Recent reviews by Running Exploder

*Goes on sale frequently for $15, so pick it up then if you want a great deal.*

You get three campaigns in the base game. Nations is the free one that everyone is familiar with, but it's only 65 tracks on the Stadium environment and has a more erratic difficulty curve. In comparison, United has 231 tracks and allows you to tour all of the various environments in both easy, medium and hard setups. Finally, Star Track has an additional 147 tracks built by the TM community. Altogether, that's 443 courses to master, and if you know anything about Trackmania it's that getting a gold medal is only the beginning. Look for the cheat to unlock every course automatically, since the requirements are admittedly a bit absurd even for a pro. If you want *even more* tracks, look for the "Classic Complete" add-on which compiles and ports over every single Trackmania course from the game's original release up to today.

Each of the seven environments requires a different skillset to perform well. Stadium has the most elaborate editing suite, allowing for some death-defying stunts. Island's blistering speeds link into satisfying drifts and extreme jumps. Desert demands precision due to awkward controls and many obstacles. Coast has simple controls and wide roads, but quickly devolves into chaos. Bay might have the slowest vehicle, but it lacks traction, meaning every turn must be anticipated far in advance. Those who are familiar with TM2020's dirt and ice materials will enjoy seeing their prototypes in the Rally and Snow environments, respectively. My personal favorite is Snow, with lots of verticality and compact, yet complex layouts.

I prefer TUF over Turbo and TM2020, but not because it is necessarily a better game. In the newest game in particular, while you have better graphics, cooler layouts and arguably more bang for your buck with the subscription, there's still something missing. Both TUF and TrackMania² are less reliant on gimmicks and are instead more focused on the raw time trials, where every track is its own beast to challenge and each turn matters. It's a case of "less is more," and while I'm by no means a pro at these games yet, I feel like the progress I've made climbing the ranks in TUF was more fulfilling than the new ones. Maybe it's just the big silly globe spinning in the main menu, or maybe it's how the medals crash onto your screen, or maybe it's each environment using a different sound when a race starts. In any case, I think there's something valuable in TUF that you won't get with modern Trackmania, and it's the best place for a beginner to actually appreciate how far both these games and Nadeo as a company have come.

A bizarre Turkish kusoge. It has screen tearing despite being an RPGMaker game. You die and respawn with infinite health. If you try to restart from the pause menu, you're kicked back to the first level. 90% of chests contain absolutely nothing, and the text displaying what you get from chests is placed in the middle layer, meaning it gets overlapped by certain tiles. Enemies walk into walls and spin so fast you'd think they were attempting to drill into the ground, and if you happen to get stuck against a wall due to their erratic behavior, it's very possible you'll zip through the level geometry entirely. I tried to experiment with this and boost my movement speed, but of course this game is so fundamentally broken that not even abusing glitches works in your favor. Actually, there were maybe ten instances during my 20 minutes with this game where my controls got messed up, and I actually began moving BACKWARDS, as though the druid was being pushed by a wind current. The only way to return to proper movement was to mash each directional input, and even then, that had a 50/50 chance to send me hurtling around the stage and lose progress.

Towards the end of the second level, there's a discolored tile on the floor which triggers a change in the music. For some reason, when I triggered it, three copies of the single track played over top of one another. Naturally, I kept hitting the tile again and again, and this caused the music to multiply so much that I ended up finishing the stage listening to an ambient noise track. I have never, ever had an issue like that occur in any game. It was glorious.

Besides the jank, there are two reasons I sincerely recommend trying this game out. For one thing, the instrumental music and level transitions add to this oddly comforting atmosphere. If nothing else, there was a lot of soul put into these two elements, even if for all I know they're just asset flips. The second reason I recommend this game is to draw attention to this being a remake of one of the very first hack 'n' slash games ever made. Druid was released for a bunch of home computers as something of a spiritual successor to Gauntlet, and even the Famicom had a port of it, so if nothing else it's interesting to see an attempt to modernize this classic, even if it fails miserably. Case in point, the druid sprite in the original moves diagonally, whereas in this he only moves in cardinal directions. Druid had two sequels released, one of which goes by Warlock, and in spite of their age they are significantly much more enjoyable to play than Project Druid. The company who made Druid, Electralyte Software, also went on to develop Cloud Kingdoms, another maze game with pinball mechanics built in.

So yeah, amateur game devs should look at this game as an example of what not to do when remaking a classic, but also it's a good idea to never mess up something as simple as being able to move your character. One day I'll finish this thing, because I have an odd appreciation for how bad it is, but as of now I'd say try this, refund it, and then go boot up an Amiga or C64 emulator and try out the real Druid games, because they actually work, unlike this.