TrackMania United Preview

Trackmania United is the latest in the quietly successful Trackmania series from Nadeo. Not content with creating one of the cult PC hits from the last few years and a game from the Video Games World Cup held in Paris, Nadeo has taken the Trackmania series one step further, integrating even more community features. While a limited number of copies can be bought direct from the official site, a boxed retail version isn't set to hit the UK until March. I entered the new Trackmania community to see just how revolutionary Nadeo's latest creation is looking.

The core single-player experience offers three main game modes: Race, Platform and Puzzle. As the names suggest, these will see you racing in simple time-trial races, attempting to reach the goal in increasingly tricky to navigate courses, and building a track to race to a goal within a time limit. Anyone familiar with the previous Trackmania games won't find too much here that's new, but with over 200 courses there's an awful lot of content.

The most daunting aspect of United is its focus on community. With all modding and community features built right into the game, you can enter virtual shops (which trade in virtual currency, Coppers) to buy new tracks, cars and the like, compete for fastest laps, and build and share your own content. The interface is streamlined to make all these features easy to reach, and if the game develops a hardcore community of fans, come March there should already be a ton of user content available.

Much like the internet sensation MySpace, each Trackmania United player will have their own personal space, which will be accessible to other players. Creating a thriving online community certainly seems to be Nadeo's goal, and they're undoubtedly going about it the right way. Budding film makers can even save replays of races and then edit them in the comprehensive edit sweet, complete with full camera control. It certainly doesn't seem like a tool that everyone will use, but it's already produced some incredible videos.

Although I haven't been able to test out all of the race environments, those on offer look great. The visual complexity of each track varies quite wildly, with easier tracks covering less distance and therefore presenting fewer objects on the screen. More advanced tracks feature pieces of track above, below and to the side of you, and effects like motion blur and bloom lighting give the game a look that wouldn't be out of place on a next-gen console. To run United smoothly with all the graphical bells and whistles you'll need a fairly beefy PC, but it seems to scale well, without a huge drop in visual quality.

With only a sample of the full content to look at and a community that's still finding its feet, our final word on Trackmania United will have to wait until March. Things are certainly looking extremely promising though, with all the ingredients already in place for what could be a fully realised all-in-one game and community. All the community features combined with a solid arcade-style driving model should make PC racing fans sit up and take notice come March.