Denis Pavlushkin (22 LVL), a finished enemy of the races ..
.. but an ardent evangelist of games based on the skill of a player. Secretly loves TRACKmania from school from school.
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Developers from the French studio Nadeo – Docks in their own genre. To their series Trackmania There is no contradictory attitude. Either users do not have souls in it, or, more likely, they did not even hear about her. And in vain, because Trackmania is one of the most long -playing racing series with potentially endless reiglable.
In March last year, the series for the first time became multi -platform – Trackmania Turbo I went to Windows, PS4 and Xbox One. A year later Nadeo released Trackmania 2: Lagoon , It seems to be an independent game, but in fact – a new thematic block to Trackmania 2 six years ago.
Is it good? Yes, as always. One catch: Nadeo for some reason insists that Trackmania Cocoa Casino sister sites 2: Lagoon is a “new” game.
Car creative
I will immediately make clarity: Nadeo positions all its games as platforms. The company seeks to entertain the player with his own forces, although it makes a couple of hundreds of tracks of varying degrees of complexity for each release. That trackmania 1 and 2, that is less popular Shootmania – These are the players self -expression sites. All the most delicious in them is always created by the hands of fans of pieces, which the developers carefully put in the gaming designer.
There are really a lot of these pieces in the game. You can configure anything in Trackmania 2: from gluing your own textures on cars to the introduction of user music and scripts. And I haven't started about the editor of the tracks!
However, the foundation for all this fun is the so -called environment – thematic sets of locations and conditions like “canyon”, “valley”, “stadium” and so on. Each of them works according to its own rules and is globally different from relatives: from the landscape and car behavior to the types of surfaces on which we ride. A good racer is not enough just to be able to steer. He needs to perfectly understand the intricacies of a particular environment and be able to adapt to the situation on the fly.
Lagoon – just one of these environment for Trackmania 2. But, contrary to the name, the "lagoon" is in no way connected with the rest in a calm place on the beach under the canopy of palm trees.
Welcome to Arkadu
Lagoon was transferred to the game just from Trackmania Turbo, where it was called Rollercoaster Lagoon. Eloquent, especially when the whole game is already stylized for the racing festival, with talismans and bright colors.
The essence of the "lagoon" is fully consistent with the atmosphere of Turbo. Trackmania, for all the exactingness to the player’s skill, has never been a simulator. Here are the cursor buttons, here is the brake – to start, attention, steering wheel! Players understood the principles literally on the fly. But it was in this environment that the game twisted the arcation and unreality of what is happening to the limit.
And this is still a fairly light track.
They wanted to be fun? Please. Ideal clutch of cars, crazy speeds, slanting music and an overwhelming amount of scenery per square meter of space. And so that you certainly do not get bored, the developers have added "magnetic" roads – it is impossible to fall from them, even if you go upside down. Trackmania almost monopolized dead loops and flirting with the geometry of the tracks, but a bond change of gravity is something new. Because of this, the really changed the feeling of the trip: try to keep track of the road when you drive along the outer side of the dead loop and, out of habit, are afraid to “break off” and go into a free flight.
In addition, perfectly controlled machines often behave unpredictably on the sand and parquet, losing all grace and chic. With the help of all these components, players create in the game designer a lot of truly dizzying tests in which driving style needs to change every dozen seconds.
If only not to call into the water, if only not to the water ..
Drive and the roof pace of the game perfectly approached the style of Trackmania Turbo, but many fans were still unhappy. Due to the multiplates that appeared, the developers seriously cut out the possibilities of modifications. The card editor has become much easier, user scripts and servers, even designing cars, disappeared – and then they limited the finished templates!
But, apparently, RollerCoaster Lagoon so sunk into the soul of riders from around the world that Nadeo decided to porty these finds in Trackmania 2 with its wide functionality for mods and fanbazes.
And here the problems begin.
"Good" conveyor
Nothing unusual, just another day at work.
Yes, Trackmania 2: Lagoon works without complaints. You are still chasing completely unimaginable tracks, as if playing, as in childhood, in cars. The scope for modifications in exclusive for PC Trackmania 2 is much wider than in Turbo, the developers finally untied the models of their hands. But, tearing off the “lagoon” from the energetic and catchy style of Trackmania Turbo, they deprived this environment of their own face.
By irony of fate, until last year, Trackmania did not have any face. Only dead loops and crazy geometry of tracks in screenshots in Steam distinguished her. But Turbo gave the environment life. When your team yells by a walkie-talkie so that you do not scratch the paint by car, and after a second you, you, flying over, fly over a balloon in the form of a pig-knuckle piggy room … You somehow do not think about the fact that it is strange: not to fall from steep ledges.
But now you can make a car like this and enjoy life.
But on the basis of the "civilian" Trackmania 2 "Laguna" it looks somehow … alien. Not that superfluous, but a little out of place. It seems to be all the components in place – the physicist, and the nuances of the environment, but … is not the same. Even cars now do not look like semi -fantastic pains capable of acceleration of up to 200 km/h in a couple of seconds, but like ordinary hatchbacks covered with stickers. As Grandfather Stanislavsky said: “I don't believe!".
But there is another problem, much more global. Nadeo, in fact, “dragged” a piece from the new Turbo to the old Trackmania 2 and are going to sell it at the price of a separate project. Of course, this will not hold the fans from the purchase, but this approach harms the whole franchise. Turbo and so scolded for gameplay restrictions, and now PC owners will buy even fewer reasons to buy it.
Green medals are more valuable than any “gold”, but getting them is a whole feat.
The “obsolete” second part also lost its attractiveness: the variety is greater, the platform is better, but the cubes for this designer are starting to be painfully expensive. In addition, in order to get a maximum of return and variety from the gameplay (and the ability to play on any server), the player needs to have all types of environment on his Maniaplanet account, and the convenience of this service is the topic for a separate angry material.
But the most offensive is that there is simply nothing new in this release. We see a lot of screams that the whole large game industry is just a repeating conveyor, but this case is directly encyclopedic. “Copy”, “insert” – ready, you can release.
Fans asked – fans received. The transfer of the most interesting find from Turbo to a more flexible toolkit will definitely go Trackmania 2 to the benefit in the long run. Unfortunately, from the point of view of the buyer, the solutions of Nadeo raise a lot of issues. Naturally, the company focuses on its own fanbase, which will not go anywhere from them: they simply have nowhere else to get the same sensations. But forever pulling content back and forth will not work. Sooner or later, developers will have to climb out of the skin to come up with something fresh and delight the audience.
The key to the editorial office received so that we (including) write a review of Lagoon, but, as you see, there is nothing especially to review. Damn him, who is to blame: either Nadeo was finished, or Ubisoft Pressed on a subsidiary … In any case, the precedent is sad, who would be behind such a lynching of the underestimated Turbo.
But if you are not worried about the moral side of the issue, I really advise you to get acquainted with Lagoon. Just look so that the head does not spin.