Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Monster 4x4 World Circuit

1. Official Site
2. Platform: Xbox
3. Publisher: Ubi Soft
4. Developer: Ubi Soft
5. Release Date: 03/23/06
6. Genre: Driving

by Mitch Youngblood

There are certain times in a person’s life when they feel compelled to speak out against the establishment. To make a stand against perceived injustices one must be absolutely certain of their personal convictions and beliefs. It helps if the evidence is overwhelmingly in their favor so the ultimate court, that of public opinion, will handily decide any outcome in their favor.

Of course, a really awful game like Monster 4X4 World Circuit will never be mistaken for something on the level of genocide, unless one is speaking in the metaphorical sense. Sadly, it was only a week ago I proclaimed State of Emergency 2 as the leading contender for Worst Game of the Year. Just when I think the bottom of the barrel has been reached along comes something else that kicks over the barrel and starts digging. In the case of Monster 4X4 World Circuit, Ubisoft skipped the digging and went straight to drilling.

Lo it has come to pass that a genuine travesty has been visited upon the gaming community by Ubisoft and for once it does not bear the name of Starforce. If you take nothing else from anything I ever write, then do not play this game. Ever. Run from it if it leaps off the shelf at you. It might be more fun to have a friend or EB Goon™ punch you repeatedly. Heck, at least that counts as social interaction.

Take a look at the screenshot at right and you’ll notice the phrase "work in progress." It would have been great if there was progress made from that point on but unfortunately there wasn’t. So enjoy what you see here because if you’re smart this is the closest you’ll get to seeing it live. Once the game is in motion, it looks bland and uninspired despite the globe trotting. Players will jump from North America to Egypt and so on but the closest we come to exploring the countryside is careful placement of recognizable markers. The result is a group of monster trucks barreling past the Sphinx while taking out construction platforms to wrack up destruction points. It’s almost enough to fire your travel agent.

You can change the look of your truck in the customization screen but that doesn’t make a hugely noticeable difference. Choosing between gold or white-colored rims can be tough but I’m confident I made the right decision by ejecting it... I mean going with the gold. Whenever you run into barriers or walls during a race you’ll come to a screeching halt. At this time, please feel free to look around at the smaller details such as the other vehicles and, uh, the dust kicking up in the distance.

I’d rank the music score if there was one so I’m a little conflicted here. On the one hand, the sound effects are, like the game itself, completely bland and uninspired yet on the other hand they did at least get the roar of the monster trucks correct. When you hit little bonus icons you hear a very happy exclamatory noise that I suppose is meant to wish you well on your race as you get lapped by opponents on their 15th nitrous boost in a row. Explosions are perfunctory as are the rest of the destruction noises. There seems to be as little care taken for the sound design as there was for the rest of the game. Not surprising really when you add up the game as a whole, but one could at least hope for a passable sound scheme. I didn’t hear anything that came close to music so if there was some then it made absolutely no impression on me.

Unfortunately, the score is below passing because even something as simple as monster trucks racing each other comes across as boring. It couldn’t have been too difficult to hire a sound crew to go to a monster truck rally, record some audio, and send it back to the studio for inspiration, could it? Maybe it comes from living in Dallas where we have one show like this a quarter but I’m actually surprised that even this part was blown off.

So you have a monster truck racing game on the Xbox. What’s the first assumption for a control scheme? The right trigger should be used for accelerate, correct? Well, how about that being assigned to "activate" stunts instead? By "activate" I mean "maybe this will work if I close my eyes and hope" but that’s what the trigger does, in theory at least. The A button is for acceleration, the B button is the hand brake, the X button is the normal brake, and the Y button is the rear view. The left trigger kicks off your nitrous boosting and if you really feel like honking your horn then the little black button is the one for you.

Now, you might wonder how the handling is. Why, certainly it can’t be as bad as the score might indicate, could it? It’s actually worse but since I could actually move the vehicles around the track 40 was a personal compromise. By no means are these trucks anywhere as streamlined as normal race cars are so don’t anticipate having an easy time of it. Since this is a race, it might have helped for the available trucks to be a SLIGHTLY more responsive. As it is you feel like you’re pulling with all your might to either the left or the right just to get the beasts to corner. Once you get the hang of the race tracks then you’ll realize cutting corners and turning earlier than the AI trucks do is the best way to stay ahead of them.

Until you get hit by the random flaming barrel in which case, hombre, you’re hosed.

Here’s how a Normal Race (i.e. plenty of bonuses and power-ups, etc.) goes. The player will sit at the starting line with the rest of the AI contenders and off you go. Everyone will use their nitro boost to get an edge, as can be expected, and they will continue using the boost repeatedly. To make things interesting you’re only given three boosts. Oh sure, there are other boosts laying around on the course usually in far out of the way places and if you’re lucky enough to pick it up before any of the AI opponents swoops in from no where then you’ll have another boost that lasts all of two seconds. Meanwhile, every other car will be farting out so much nitrous that you’ll think the cars are made of it.

Where the game gets even more "fun," and by "fun" I mean "sucks the sweat off a dead man’s balls," is in the different ways the race features apply to every car except yours. There are tons of purple-highlighted ramps with a bright flashing "Stunt" at the crest of it around the course. When you go through these, you’re supposed to pull the right trigger and move the right thumbstick either left or right and you’ll perform a stunt. This is "in theory" because only about one out of every five attempts at this resulted in my monster truck doing a 360 or something else.

I figured it might have to do with filling up the stunt meter that appears at the bottom left whenever you go over one of these platforms. If so, then hell if I could make it work. All I know is that the fabled Stunt platforms barely if ever worked for me. On the other hand, the rest of the cars have no trouble whatsoever flipping through the air like an acrobat with 40 inch rims. I did land on my back once, but that’s because my truck was moving so slowly I literally fell over the edge of the stunt platform.

Scattered about the courses are flaming barrels that can be used to slow down opponents. Simply line up your truck with whomever you want to slow down, smack into a barrel, and it will go flying through the air like a heat-seaking missle COMPLETE with following the truck around twists and turns before landing on top of it. It’s really helpful when this happens to you as you’re going up a ramp and have to fall back to the bottom and go around it. Yeah, that’s a real good idea for a fun challenge Ubi. Thanks.

You do have the option of playing a "pure race" which is racing without all the different tools with which the AI cheats. As such, you can actually win some of these but it remains tough to tell whether it’s skill on the player’s part or stupidity on the AI’s part. For example, there are shortcuts scattered throughout each map. Why then does the AI hit those shortcuts the first four of five laps but then go out of their way to miss those shortcuts on the final lap? None of this is an exaggeration by the way. This is me carefully following different cars around the maps on different races as a form of amusement.

The different cars range from inventive (the jacked up school bus) to lame (everything else) and I never really noticed a difference between how they affected my outcomes. Even after assigning upgrades to the different stats of a vehicle it handled no differently than before. I wonder if the developers decided to put in vehicular stat management as nothing more than the illusion of pimping your ride. Because it bloody well didn’t help my chances any when I maxed out handling and speed yet was routinely pummeled by nitrous-farting AI trucks that weighed as much as mine and were three times as fast and handled the courses like they knew exactly where they were going.

For cheating AI and stupid challenges I’ll go play the Burnout series. At least there I know to expect this kind of half-assery and the explosions are easier on the eyes.

As worthless as this game is, and it is plenty worthless, there are a few multi-player modes you might find interesting. The monster truck soccer one is neat, but the original Blood series did the same thing with human heads. Not sure why I brought that out of the ol’ memory box just now, but it may have something to do with a certain fantasy I’m currently experiencing that involves the Monster 4X4 World Circuit development team. Other than that there’s exactly zero reasons in the world why gamers would want to play this the first time let alone a second or third.

Someone needs to quietly take the development team for Monster 4X4 World Circuit aside and explain to them why hard to control monster trucks and blatantly cheating AI do not a fun racing game make. At no point along the way did this reviewer not want to carpet bomb someone as he played it. That’s exactly the sort of thing that cause people to wind up on terrorist watch lists and try explaining your way out of that. Of course, if you can trick the arresting agents into playing five minutes of this gem then they may even join you in your quest for revenge.

That’s a long way of saying at no point in your life should you ever play Monster 4X4 World Circuit. Even if there’s money on the table, you’ll come up a loser.

Gaming Trend Score

38

1. Graphics: 76
2. Audio: 50
3. Controls: 40
4. Gameplay: 25
5. Value/Replay: 10
6. OVERALL:38