Title: Monster Jam Steel Titans
Genre: Racing, Sports
Developer: Rainbow Studios
Publisher: THQ Nordic
Platform(s): Xbox One [reviewed], PS4, PC
Release Date: Jun 25, 2019
Price: $29.99
Monster trucks are as American as apple pie and betting on baseball. Everyone loves it, but don’t talk about it out in public. There’s just something about giant, gas-guzzling trucks that has you on the edge of your seat, even though you paid for the whole thing. It’s one of those things that looks silly on TV but is a whole different beast in person. If you ever get the chance, I suggest you visit a Monster Jam event at least once in your life.
When it comes to video games though, things aren’t quite as exciting as the real thing. To be fair, the last monster truck game I really dove into was the one used to sell Windows 95 (maybe 98) as a part of the Madness series from Microsoft. Since then I’ve played a few games here and there, but Monster Jam Steel Titans is the first serious go in some twenty years.
So, what’s changed? Well, not all that much in reality. We still have big trucks bouncing around with physics like they belong on the moon. It’s a fun experience, but Monster Jam Steel Titans feels less simulation and more arcade experience. That’s not a bad thing in theory, but the point of the game is to bring about a simulation of the actual Monster Jam racing series.
On loading the game, you are presented with a solid tutorial that takes you through the basics of the gameplay. You can then dive into Monster Jam University to learn the harder skills you’ll need in career mode. With a game of this nature a tutorial is essential and it’s clear and well laid out. Driving, although loose and floaty, is fun and you monster truck has some serious moves. But once you get into the game is where some nagging issues peek their head out.
But then you get into the game and I have to say that I absolutely hated the experience on first go around. Trucks controlled like fighter jets, with tiny movements of the joystick, environments looked almost last gen, and the racing felt overly brutal with AI taking the piss out of me. It wasn’t a good start and I really felt the game placed an unneeded wall in front of the player. But then I kept playing, and little by little Monster Jam Steel Titans really opened up for me.
This is a budget title to be sure, but one that has a fair bit under the hood. You’re locked into a single monster truck off the bat (Northern Nightmare) and shuffled into the career mode that had a surprising amount of gameplay styles on offer. When I think monster trucks, I think crushing cars, downing flips, and head-to-head races inside a stadium. I don’t think huge open-road waypoint races or circuit tracks.
The racing is fast and furious, but a challenge in the early stages. It wasn’t until I understood the upgrade system that relies on points you earn from races that things got fun. This means you’ll be slogging it for a little while until you earn enough points to upgrade your trucks stats. It’s not a deep or customizable system, but it’s something. The first series I ran I didn’t even make a high enough placement to race in the final. After I upgraded with the points I earned losing, I wrecked every other racer on the track.
Still, problems arose because of the races that are on open ground in the waypoint races. There are no barriers or rails to keep you pointed in the right direction like most racing games. You race to checkpoints, which isn’t a big deal, but tracks (or what you might call tracks) have no rhyme or reason at times. It’s incredibly easy to get off track and lose major positions. One mistake and you can kiss a podium goodbye in the early game. And god help you if your truck snaps a wheel and are forced to stop to perform a magic repair minigame. It’s a pain, but one nearly negated after a few upgrades, which does feel weird. It’s like you are really underpowered or really overpowered and never fighting for a tense finish.
None of this kills the experience, but what might be the weird framerate issues on the Xbox One that hamper the racing fun with slowdown and stuttering, something that is unacceptable in a racing game. It’s darn near unplayable in certain segments. This happened after playing for a few hours and at random. Quitting the game and restarting fixed the issue, but it was really odd, even if pretty rare. But the real kicker is that I spent nearly all my time with the game not crushing any cars; you know, the very thing that defines monster trucks in pop culture.
I think the biggest knock against Monster Jam Steel Titans is that it just never really knows what sort of game it wants to be. It wants to welcome new players, but controls are a pain to come to grips with touchy controls; it wants to be a simulation but focuses on score multipliers and waypoint racing off a track; it wants to be about monster trucks, but you instead mostly race and crush boxes. It’s the old problem of trying to do too many things and not doing any of them particularly well. And the whole career mode is a bit of a mess with race/competition types thrown at you without warning. God help you when the two-wheel challenges drop out of nowhere!
On the graphics front this is really a screenshot sort of game. I say this because in still shoots it looks bloody gorgeous. All the trucks are well-modeled and look fantastic and feature fun damage physics of their own. Sure, these aren’t complicated models, but they look great. What doesn’t look great are the environment and particle effects which clearly are in the budget range. Environments feel almost last generation and particle effects are nearly non-existent. Trucks sort of just get dirty and a stock effects gets kicked up by your wheels, but it feels cut-and-paste and not natural. To be fair, focusing on the trucks first was the right call. This also means that the photo mode is a freaking delight, trying to set up just the perfect shot at any time.
Gameplay also allows you a lot of neat goodies to unlock, including new trucks, even though I stuck with the first one given because I didn’t see Big Foot anywhere. What isn’t so neat is a lack of online multiplayer. It’s weird to see a racing game in 2019 release without some sort of online multiplayer support, especially with so much competitive racing going on. To help offset this there are a lot of gameplay modes, not all of which are racing in nature.
Where we’re going we won’t need physics!
Freestyle is a blast as you flip your truck around all over the stadium building up points. It’s super simple and reminds me a lot of the old Tony Hawk games. You pull off crazier and crazier moves to pump up those numbers on the score. Rhythm tracks are where you show your skill in navigating the bumps like in motocross racing and my favorite bits, two-wheel skills are a brutal challenge, timed destruction loves those crates and porta johns, and head-to-head is like Nascar on a paper plate. I hate it and it’s just circling a mound against another tuck really fast.
But my favorite part of the game has nothing to do with racing or with pulling off stunts. My favorite bit is the freeride mode you are dumped into every time you start the game or aren’t in any of the race/stunt modes. As you unlock new series the game map opens up as it’s all one huge map, instead of these disconnected races. This part of the game essentially turns Monster Jam Steel Titans into an open-world game. You can drive around and explore, earning points along the way by finding special jumps and locations. There are even a ton of goodies hidden in each area to discover.
Monster Jam Steel Titans isn’t a bad game by any means, just one that isn’t sure who its catering too or what it wants to be. It does a lot of different things but is a master of none of them. It also comes with a few technical issues on Xbox One that will hopefully (or already have been) addressed in a patch. The racing is quite a bit of fun, but it’s better without any other racers ruining your good time which does sort of defeat the point. That said, if you are a fan of the Monster Jam series then this is probably going to be your cup of tea.
If you are on the fence about monster trucks I’d maybe say wait for a sale before taking the plunge. I can still recommend this one as there isn’t anything else on the market quite like it. As for myself? I’m going to go dig up Monster Truck Madness because at least that game lets you drive in first-person mode.
“Monster Jam Steel Titans is a budget title with a fair bit under the hood”
Final Score: 3/5
*A copy was provided for review*
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