Picture this scenario:

You're hurtling through the desert at tremendous speeds, throwing your car around corners and over rises like the devil himself is behind you. You're close to the finish line and when you spare a glance at the timer you see that you're beating the record time!

Let's take a time out for a minute here. So far this scenario is nothing special or remarkable; there are many games that this scenario could be applied to - so what makes TrackMania United any different from these games? It's what happens next:

You take the second-to-last corner and suddenly you find yourself driving your car around what appears to be a giant loop. You can feel gravity's pull slowing your car down as you near the top of the giant loop you're suddenly falling. Unfortunately you didn't have enough speed to get around the loop this time.

TrackMania United is not like any other racing game you've played, because at some point in a meeting the developers decided to go mad. Clean off the plate mad. Instead of creating a racing game where the track goes in only a mere two dimensions, they decided to add loops and walls and all sorts of other things that cars usually don't encounter into the mix. And it works - brilliantly!

The basic premise of TrackMania United is to get your car to the finish line in the quickest time possible, although this is usually easier said than done with the many obstacles and challenges that stand in your path. These challenges could include going off a jump at a particular speed and angle to neatly thread your car through a hole in some far off wall. Get it wrong and you'll be powerless to do anything except watch the car slam straight into a solid wall! Although you will see three other cars on the track, they have no substance - meaning that you can plough right into them and neither of you will be affected. They are, in essence, ghost cars, whose purpose is only as a guide to show you the Gold, Silver and Bronze times.

A key and integral part of TrackMania United is hinted at in the title; the players are very much united through a detailed online network that is built straight into the game. When you race around any of the tracks you are presented with a list of the best times that players in your country and around the world have managed on that particular track. If you think you're good enough then it's a simple matter of clicking the 'Official Run' button at the start of the race to register that particular lap time with the official leaderboards. However, it's not simply a matter of clicking that button at the start of every race just in case you happen to get lucky, because although the first official run is free, subsequent runs cost 10 coppers.

Coppers are the currency of TrackMania United and you earn them by beating Gold, Silver, Bronze and record times during official runs. You can even make coppers by posting your replays and movies from the game, which other users can purchase from you for a select number of coppers. The people who buy your replays can watch them, race against your ghost and, as such, learn from the people who currently hold the top times. And this is only one of the modes of gameplay!

One of the more interesting modes is the Solo Puzzle Challenge, where you're given a scenario with a start line, a finish line, a number of checkpoints that can be passed in any order and various track pieces with which to complete the track. The puzzles themselves start out simple enough, only requiring a few pieces placed in obvious positions, but they get steadily harder and harder until even those who fancy themselves as 'puzzle masters' will be stumped.

As with most new games these days, TrackMania can be played online against opponents from around the world, giving that extra challenge for those who laugh in the face of the hardest difficulty mode in the game, because, like most online games, there is always somebody better than you to really put your skills to the test. TM United also offers creation tools like the well-known circuit editor, which allows you to easily use more than 1000 construction blocks to make your own tracks, which are playable in either single or multiplayer mode, meaning that it's possible to let your imagination run wild, creating all sorts of strange and obscure tracks that could make even the most hardcore of racers think twice. In short the vast, and I mean vast, selection of different pieces means that even if you complete the game 100% there is still an ever increasing collection of user made tracks for you to download and race on.

If you are buying this game expecting cars to handle like they would in simulators like Gran Turismo then this may not be the right game for you. The controls are very blunt and quite unresponsive to small adjustments. I found that I was better off playing using the directional buttons on the keyboard for full lock turning rather than a USB steering wheel, because turning slightly in one direction with the wheel didn't make much of a difference and I found I had to slam it back and forth to actually accomplish anything that could remotely be called 'steering'. This kind of issue is something that could theoretically be addressed in future patches of the game, but for now the controls leave much to be desired. The physics and the way the car handles are also rather unrealistic, but in an arcade game like TrackMania that's to be expected - and it's actually an integral part of the gameplay, because if the cars handled anything even remotely close to realistically then I highly doubt you'd have any chance whatsoever of making the majority of the jumps and loops in the game.

The look of TrackMania United is remarkably similar in design to any of the other TrackMania games; nothing major has been done to the graphics, except a little fine tuning and polishing to make the game that little bit smoother than the previous titles. If you've ever played a TrackMania game before then close your eyes and remember how it looked, then make it look a bit better. That's TrackMania United.

If you've never played TrackMania before and you have even a slight interest in racing and puzzle games then it's well worth hopping into the driver's seat of TrackMania United. If, on the other hand, you own previous TrackMania titles then the only thing you are really gaining is a new (but admittedly huge) set of tracks, plus of course the online aspect that allows you to join the TrackMania community, race against other players' ghosts and share your custom-designed tracks, so it's up to you whether you deem these as good enough reasons to make the purchase.

Reviewed by Scott McCabe for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).