If you are looking for an impractically large American truck that does not run on conventional fuel and looks ridiculous, will you then go for a stainless steel Tesla triangle that wants to eat your fingers, or would you go for a 3.35 meter tall, methanol-powered beast that literally Backflips? I know which one I would choose. If my friends and family judge me for driving a truck that looks totally untrustworthy, it’s because it’s dressed up like a scary pirate.

Monster Jam Showdown is equally dedicated to these five-ton morons in the form of dogs and dinosaurs. Although the scope is very modest, developer Milestone has given this family-friendly racing game a pleasantly drift-heavy driving feel, a wild selection of stunts and great damage effects.

Monster Jam Showdown forgoes the open-world approach of the otherwise mediocre Steel Titans games. I personally don’t miss it, but for anyone who has previously enjoyed romping around in these open environments between curated events, this might be a disappointment.

The cards in Showdown can see like open worlds with races and events scattered throughout, but they’re not. In fact, the map screens could have simply been a bar of event thumbnails or an ordered list; Showdown gains nothing from having us shuffle around and zoom into maps within maps to find the next available event. It actually feels like a waste of time.

The Drive The driving experience is very good, though. I found it particularly nice to have all the driving aids turned off, and I enjoy the feeling of hurling these huge vehicles into drifts and seeing them lean back and slide through corners at full throttle. As with Steel Titans and Monster Truck Championship 2020, Showdown features independent rear-wheel steering controlled via the right stick. That’s a big difference from these types of racing games, and it’s a very satisfying additional element of racing to master. My 10-year-old, on the other hand, felt more comfortable with some of the aids turned on – particularly the steering assist, which applies some Angle to the rear wheels automatically, but he can also crank on himself a little more as he becomes more confident in using the right stick to negotiate really tight corners. Splitscreen was a success; if he loses and still laughs, it’s generally a strong sign that something is going right.

Crush Hour

While the regular driving is rooted in a certain degree of reality, the stunt controls are far more fantastic, giving us complete control over the truck’s spin in the air. Sure, it’s not particularly realisticbut there’s a lot of fun in stringing together long Tony Hawk-style combos in the stunt arenas. It wasn’t particularly difficult to get high scores (and creating and maintaining a combo should be fairly easy for those with a lot of racing experience), but some of the moves require some finesse – like pulling off a perfect nose wheelie and moonwalking the truck backwards. One glaring flaw is the way trucks interact with crash cars; they collide with them and bounce off of them Away too hard. It made me more inclined to avoid them rather than squash them, which seems to be the opposite of monster truck driving.

There are two difficulty levels below the normal AI option, including an easy and a very easy mode. Showdown seems to be suited to an audience that invariably includes very young players who are just here to see Grave Digger do donuts.

In that sense, Showdown is admittedly much smarter than Steel Titans 2 when it comes to unlocking trucks. It doesn’t hand over the keys to childhood favorites like Grave Digger or Megalodon immediatelybut you earn them relatively quickly. That gives you plenty of time to tear it up on the track with them long before you run out of events. Steel Titans 2 completely buried Monster Jam’s most iconic trucks as remote unlocks, meaning that once you secured the most famous ones, you pretty much had nothing left to do. It was essentially the automotive equivalent of rolling credits with all the rocket launcher ammo in your pocket.

Big truck hunter

There are 40 trucks in Showdown, many of which are appearing in a video game for the first time. These include independent trucks like Bad Company, which has a full holographic wrap that is replicated very effectively in the game. Showdown also sees the debut of Excaliber, the current take on a monster truck that has been around since the ’80s. The trucks all feel the same when driving, but Excaliber’s retro paint job and boxy, square Chevy body (complete with a set of classic KC Daylighters on the roof) made it my favorite.

The detail is impressive, including small details like the scuffed paint on the back of the chassis from standing up while doing wheelies. It’s things like this that make them feel like real, race-ready vehicles rather than big toys. Damage is also well represented, with the trucks losing flapping segments of their fiberglass shells.

You can unlock and apply bonus liveries and buffs, and these buffs typically give certain trucks better multipliers for certain tricks. This is an effective way to get us to switch, especially if you’re looking for an advantage to score enough points to complete one of Showdown’s many side objectives during events. Winning is one thing, but often you’ll need to win while also scoring a certain number of points on a specific trick.

However, admittedly, there is nothing here that really immerses you in the world behind the scenes of monster truck competition other than an actual Motor Sports. Monster Truck Championship is still a one-off. Showdown would have benefited from at least some sort of bespoke truck system. Perhaps a selection of simple pickup truck bodies that could be painted and put on a standard chassis? Milestone already has a great, working livery editor in its excellent Hot Wheels Unleashed games.

It would also have benefited from a format that better reflects Monster Jam as a touring show, rather than a simple list of events to tackle. Showdown features just over 120 events, split between circuit racing, short head-to-head stages and freestyle arena activities. The events are short, typically lasting just a few minutes.

The racing is wild and full of physical contact, and Milestone has done a good job of giving it a good sense of speed considering monster trucks max out at 100 mph. The head-to-head races on tight, short tracks are the hardest to master against the high-level AI; since you can’t really make a single mistake in these cases, winning them was rewarding for me. However, the whole thing gets a bit boring. Monster Jam Showdown’s mid-range seems to have kept the track selection a bit modest, and in order to save fresh tracks until late in the game, Showdown lets you race on the same (or mostly similar) tracks in consecutive races. Weather conditions can change, but overall this gets a bit boring. More variety in the stadiums and arenas would have helped too.