(Review) TransMania Nations Forever: Pedal to the Metal, For Free
Start your engines or better yet start up your browser to download the free arcade racing game, TransMania Nations Forever. Developed by French development team Nadeo, TransMania Nations Forever is the sequel to TransMania Nations and TransMania United. I decided to take this free racing game for a spin to judge whether it’s worth the download - but there’s not a loss right, it’s free after all!
After downloading from one of the 10 websites that is hosting the TransMania Nations Forever installer (I chose Worthplaying), installation is relatively quick and easy. The start menu gives you a host of video options (by clicking the Advanced option) including the ability to view the game in 3D if you happen to have a pair of 3D glasses laying around. Once you start the game up you can setup a profile, including choosing your country and state. The purpose behind providing that information is the game will show your ranking worldwide and for your country and state. Also the country you choose will determine the skin of your vehicle. The USA vehicle skin is quite patriotic with stars and red, white and blue colors.
After setting up your profile you can choose several options from the main menu including Solo, Online or Party play. I decided to try out the Solo first and started on the easy tracks first. TransMania Nations Forever has quite a few tracks for each difficulty level, White being easy and Black being the hardest. As you proceed with the initial tracks you can unlock more tracks to race on. The controls are very simple: the arrow keys accelerate, brake and turn your car, 1, 2, and 3 keys change your view, and Return will reset your vehicle on the track. I used my Xbox 360 controller rather than the keyboard and it made driving much more fun.
Racing is simple as well - don’t expect Gran Turismo mechanics here; racing for the most part is quick and easy; your main challenge is beating the track times and the 2nd player ghost. The car turns pretty easy but the brake is definitely needed on particular corners. One thing that did irk me was the trying to land the car after flying off of ramps or hills as the car can flip over or crash into a sidewall easily. I found that slowing down before hitting a jump sometimes helps.
The lack of realism in the car mechanics actually makes the game more enjoyable in my opinion as anyone can pick up and play this game. The tracks are somewhat short especially in the White level mode but they are definitely unique with some tracks being elevated in the sky or rally-like tracks in the dirt. Also the different track modes can make beating the track times difficult, such as the obstacle tracks with their pitfalls and objects placed to slow you down or throw you off the track.
The core feature of TransMania Nations Forever is the online multiplayer. You are able to represent your country in a worldwide ladder ranking, for example, USA is currently ranked 6th. Hopefully I can help out with getting that higher! The rankings further breakdown by State so you can see who is numero uno. After viewing the rankings you can choose a server to play on and there were plenty running when I was playing. Players can also host their own games and choose from different settings. When players choose a server they can see the race track line-up as well as choose to join or become a spectator. Each server has different tracks setup to automatically rotate, some with as many as 165 different tracks setup. While playing online it didn’t seem laggy on my end but I frequently saw cars popping up in the air or falling through the ground. The game does handle up to 40 players at a time (at least that’s the most I’ve seen) and aside from the other players popping around it did not affect my gameplay.
Update 4.17.08 - The popping and disappearing of the other players vehicles was probably due to the server I was playing on at the time. I played on a different servers and all the vehicles displayed correctly.
Apart from racing you can use the game’s level editor to create your own tracks. I’m not too big on level editing in games but with simple and advanced modes you can build yourself some crazy tracks. Also the vehicle editor allows you to create a custom skin for your car. I found this area a bit lacking, it didn’t seem that you could upload images to use for your skin and the editor interface for this area is a bit confusing.
Overall TransMania Nations Forever is a pretty decent game and you can’t really complain too much about anything because it is free. I’m definitely impressed with the amount of solo and online playability that you get for free - you’ll be playing tracks over and over again trying to beat the times and getting your ranking up in both modes. You also get decent graphics and just general racing fun without having ads plastered everywhere - hell, there are games you pay $60 for and you get ads in them (glances over at EA). If you really enjoy this free version then you should look into paying the subscription fee for TransMania United, which will upgrade your free account and will give you more features.
You can download TransMania Nations Forever from these locations:
If anyone decides to download and play, you can add me to your in-game buddy list as “MadLion”.
It’s not on Mac I don’t think so no can do for now…