Monster Jam

Monster Jam is pretty interesting, but not in a good way. It's like the time I saw a legless, homeless man in London. I don't mean drunk; he literally had no legs. And he'd use this battered old skateboard to roll up and down the street, collecting spare change in an empty Starbucks cup. He was pretty interesting to watch, but I wouldn't want to take the reins of his life and give it a whirl.

So it is with Monster Jam. Somewhere along the line, like the homeless guy, the bottom fell out from underneath this game and it all went to hell. This is a game where you take the wheel of a monster truck and race other monster trucks, the objective being to trash everything in sight and win the race. Except that this game is so fundamentally flawed that you can only feasibly do one or the other: destroy property or race. If you try to do both as you're supposed to, you're likely to lose the race.

See, destroying things in Monster Jam earns you career points, which in turn unlock more Monster Trucks for you to smash shacks and yellow water-towers with (surprisingly common structures in-game). So you have incentive to tear things up a bit, but you have to balance your need to wreck shit with your goal of winning the race and it seems to defeat the purpose of the game. Throw in some nifty design flaws and physics that'd make Newton spin in his grave and hey, you've got Monster Jam.

If you drive one up a ramp, you soar off into the sky with all the ease and grace of a dove. It's like you're driving on the moon. Even more damning is the way you interact with objects on the map. The first time you hit say, the popular yellow water-tower structure, it falls apart. You had better watch out on the next lap though, because that thing will be out to get you. Never mind the fact that you trashed it effortlessly on the first run, because now that it's destroyed it wants vengeance. If you so much as clip it you'll spin out of the race.

Monster Jam is essentially split into two types of gameplay, excluding the multiplayer: "track" mode and "stadium" mode. Stadium mode has you (either alone or against an NPC truck) undertaking various types of challenge, from time-attacks to crush-fests, but they're short and feel kind of lacking.

Graphically, this game is nothing special. You get the impression that the emphasis on this game was vested in playability rather than pretty graphics, which would be fair enough if they hadn't messed it up with a combination of loopy physics and punishing the player for breaking things when they're clearly supposed to.

The one thing Monster Jam does do well is in convincing you that you are wrecking the place. Trees can be uprooted, vehicles tossed aside and, of course, water-towers knocked down. There's never any damn water in them, though...