As a small child growing up, I used to stay glued to the television, hunting down programme adverts to determine whether I had stuff to watch or not. Here we’re talking about a decade ago, meaning PC Gaming was almost non-existent except for a few overpriced Daffy Duck titles, and my parents had decided on passing on the PlayStation 1 or any gaming system for that matter. That meant that the TV was the only decent pastime I had, and one of my favourite shows brought me the joy of watching Monster Trucks smash everything in their wake. That is why upon watching the trailers for Monster Truck Destruction, I thought to myself “Why not?” My thoughts now are the opposite. “Why?”
Monster Truck Destruction, as the title itself implies, is a game based on Monster Trucks. While the game is available on Steam, one should specify that this was originally a mobile and tablet title, which was eventually ported to the so called Master Race. Unfortunately, the game does not seem to have been optimised for the port, such as clunky controller support or non-responding mouse. The keyboard actually works, so that is a positive at least, although the key bindings are quite random and unexplained. Let us at least go over the gameplay and features first. Obviously, you control a Monster Truck, a giant four wheel drive beast, designed specifically to destroy whatever comes in your way. So far so good. The game features two main modes, being racing and freestyle. The racing is the main mode of the game, and can be considered the campaign of the title, and we will tackle it in more detail in a bit. The freestyle section, as the name implies, is the trick section of Monster Trucks, having a timer counting down as you nail trick after trick to raise your score as much as you can, emulating the famous Maximum Destruction and Gravedigger in what they do best.
As mentioned before, the core of the game revolves around racing. How the game is set up is not a bad idea to be fair, having a sort of tournament mechanic in which winning will result in you progressing to the next phase while a loss will knock you out, meaning players will have to restart the mode again. The races are not that difficult initially, so getting the hang of things is rather quick. Winning tournaments, or winning some duels while not winning the whole thing nets you money with which you can purchase more trucks to expand your collection. The idea is a good one, but too repetitive. Instead of only a tournament, there could be a sort of individual race against the AI or earn money by performing in front of a crowd, and winning money depending on fan cheering or stuff. I don’t know, it’s just an idea of the moment.
As for graphics or sound, neither is impressive, and both struggle even to get a sufficient rating. Scaling was done discretely, but nothing was improved upon from the mobile version, and because of the incredible competition faced by PC titles, this was quite a lazy port in fairness. Looking at other ports, such as Undead Labs’ Moonrise, one can observe how a port is made, since responsiveness and PC Optimisation was placed high on the importance scale, which yielded a very good result. Unfortunately, Moonrise turned out to be on the short term planning of the development studio, as the project seems to have been slowly shut down without even fully releasing.
Unfortunately, Monster Truck Destruction does not really make the cut. It does have solid basics, which have proven successful on the mobile and tablet market, but on PC the competition is such that more is expected from anyone bringing their software on the platform. The very low price is a small incentive for people who like Monster Trucks to try this and judge for themselves, which they have all the right to, since subjectivity is the only common grounds for reviewers like myself. Even though the game does have some positives, the biggest one of them all is for the developers to refine further their games if they want to port over, or else develop entirely for PC and follow an inverse strategy as the one pursued for MTD. It may pay off better then.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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