The First 10 Minutes: Monster Jam

Manager
Friday, June 27, 2008 | 3:50 PM
3 comments

Xbox 360 PS3 Wii

Activision has brought Monster Jam to Europe, the game based on the Monster Trucks tour with the same name that travels around Europe right now. The game itself isn't something special, but the multiplayer mode brings some fun at least.

The game has average graphics, but the game instead concentrates heavily on physics, letting you smash through most of the objects on the track. The engine does its job, but the first seconds in each race of the multiplayer mode is a framedrop-fest. The singleplayer mode practically consists of you choosing a truck and then pick a track, and off you go. There are tournaments to be played, but you can't customize the truck and it is more or less just about going through tournament after tournament, unlocking trucks and tracks for the multiplayer mode.

Surprisingly, the game does not offer any kind of online play. The splitscreen multiplayer is tons of fun though, and it has been one of the games that I've been playing with my friends for the latest sessions. It's really easy to pick up as a beginner, and as the gameplay is so random it often brings up tons of laughter.

It's hard to keep the first place as there are tons of places to fall down to forcing you to respawn (often to last place), and there's nothing stopping you, your friends or the computer-driven trucks of driving into eachother. The Stadium Circuits are really fun, short tracks that becomes even funner when you're four players on tracks created for two.

Below you'll find some gameplay videos of the normal racing mode, the Stadium Circuit mode and the Freestyle mode. Unfortunately the game seems to have some issues with showing everything correctly in 480p, with the screen going a bit dark and trucks looking worse than in 720p. Even the text looks really bad in the menus, and no patch has been released to fix this. My processor can't handle 720p video capturing yet, so this is unfortunately the only way of capturing videos right now.
I captured some images in 720p to show how the game 'really' looks on most's HDTV's.