If you’re on the hunt for an impractically large, American truck that doesn’t run on conventional fuel and looks ridiculous, are you going to go with a stainless steel Tesla triangle that wants to eat your fingers, or would you opt for an 11-foot tall, methanol-powered brute that can do literal backflips? I know which one I’d choose. If my friends and family are going to dunk on me for driving a truck that looks deeply unserious, it’s going to be because it’s dressed like a spooky pirate.
Monster Jam Showdown is equally devoted to these five-ton doofuses shaped like dogs and dinosaurs. While it’s very modest in scope, developer Milestone has injected this family-friendly racer with an enjoyably drift-heavy driving feel, a wild range of stunts, and great damage effects.
Monster Jam Showdown ditches the open world approach of the otherwise mediocre Steel Titans games. It’s not something I miss personally, but this may come as a disappointment to anybody that previously relished rampaging around those open environments between curated events.
The maps in Showdown may look like open worlds with races and events scattered across them, but they’re not. In fact, the map screens could have just been a bar of event thumbnails, or an ordered list; Showdown doesn’t gain anything from having us shuffling around and zooming into maps within maps seeking out the next available event. It actually feels like a waste of time.
As with Steel Titans and 2020’s Monster Truck Championship, Showdown features independent rear-wheel steering controlled by the right stick. The driving feel, however, is very good. I found it particularly nice to have all the handling aids off, and I enjoy the sensation of slinging these huge vehicles into drifts and seeing them squat back and powerslide through bends on the throttle. As with Steel Titans and 2020’s Monster Truck Championship, Showdown features independent rear-wheel steering controlled by the right stick. It’s a great point of difference with these sorts of racers, and it’s a very satisfying extra element of racing to master. My 10-year-old, on the other hand, was more comfortable with some of the assists on – particularly the steering aid that applies some angle to the rear wheels automatically, but also lets him crank a little more on himself as he got more confident using the right stick to really whip around tight corners. Splitscreen has been a success; if he’s losing and still laughing that’s generally a strong signal something is going right.
While the regular driving is rooted in a degree of reality, the stunt controls are far more fantastical and give us total control of the truck’s rotation in the air. Sure, it’s not especially realistic, but it is plenty of fun to string together lengthy, Tony Hawk-style combos in the stunt arenas. It wasn’t particularly challenging to accumulate huge scores (and building and maintaining a combo should be pretty simple for those with plenty of racing experience) but some of the moves do require a fair bit of finesse – like nailing a perfect nose wheelie and moonwalking your truck backwards. One noticeable blemish is the way trucks interact with crush cars; they collide with and bounce off them way too harshly. It made me more inclined to avoid them rather than squish them, which seems antithetical to monster trucking.
There are two layers of difficulty beneath the normal AI option, including an easy and very easy mode. Showdown does seem suitable for an audience that will invariably include very young players who are just here to see Grave Digger do donuts.
Showdown does seem suitable for an audience that will invariably include very young players who are just here to see Grave Digger do donuts. On that note, Showdown is admittedly much smarter than Steel Titans 2 when it comes to unlocking trucks. It won’t hand over the keys to kid-favourites like Grave Digger or Megalodon immediately, but they’ll be earned relatively quickly. This gives you plenty of time to thrash with them on the track, well before you run out of events. For its part, Steel Titans 2 completely buried Monster Jam’s most iconic trucks as distant unlocks, meaning that by the time you secured the most famous ones, you were pretty much out of things to do. It was essentially the automotive equivalent of rolling credits with all the rocket launcher ammo still in your pocket.
There are 40 trucks in Showdown, many of which are starring in a video game for the first time. This includes independent trucks like Bad Company, which features a full holographic wrap that is recreated very effectively in-game. Showdown also sees the debut of Excaliber, the current version of a monster truck that’s been around since the ’80s. The trucks all feel the same to drive, but Excaliber’s retro livery and boxy, Chevy square body shell (complete with its array of classic KC Daylighters perched on the roof) have made it my favourite.
Detail is impressive, including small touches like the scuffed paint on the back of the chassis from standing up during wheelies. It’s things like this that help them feel like real, race-worn vehicles rather than big toys. Damage is also well translated as the trucks shed flapping segments of their fibreglass shells.
You can unlock and apply bonus liveries and buffs, and those buffs tend to give certain trucks better multipliers for specified tricks. This is an effective way to make us switch around , specifically when you’re looking for an edge to net enough points to earn one of Showdown’s many secondary objectives during the events. Winning is one thing, but often you’ll need to win while also racking up a specific amount of points doing a nominated trick.
However, there’s admittedly nothing else here to really immerse you into the behind-the-scenes world of monster truck competition as an actual motorsport. Monster Truck Championship still stands alone there. At a minimum, Showdown would’ve really benefited from some kind of custom truck system. Maybe an assortment of plain pickup shells that could be painted and thrown on a standard chassis? Milestone does already have a great, working livery editor in its excellent Hot Wheels Unleashed games, after all.
It might have also benefited from a format that better reflects Monster Jam as a touring show, rather than a straightforward list of events to tackle. There are just over 120 events in Showdown, split across circuit races, short head-to-head stages, and freestyle arena activities. Events are short and only tend to take a few minutes.
The racing is frantic and full of contact, and Milestone has done well to imbue it with a nice sense of speed considering monster trucks top out at 100 miles per hour. The head-to-head races on tight, short stages are the toughest to master against the high-level AI; since you can’t really make a single mistake in these instances I found them rewarding to win. It does all get a bit repetitive, though. Monster Jam Showdown’s mid-price sensibilities appears to have kept the selection of tracks a bit modest and, in order to save fresh ones until late in the game, Showdown will have you racing on the same (or mostly similar) courses in consecutive races. The weather conditions may change, but overall this gets a bit tedious. More stadium and arena variety would’ve helped, also.
