Put the £1.69 Back in Your Pocket
Monster Ramp Racing is tempting. If you’re reading this review then there’s a good chance that you’ve been tempted too. It’s clearly mixing Trials HD gameplay with monster trucks, and it’s hard to imagine that combo going wrong. And at £1.69, the risks are low. Even if it’s not excellent, you’ve only spent a couple of bob.
Well, we’re here to tell you that Monster Ramp Racing is a trap, even at the price. While it might seem like a no-brainer, it’s the opposite. It’s so unplayable and broken that the real no-brainer is to keep your distance. Please, please don’t buy it.
Spend it on a Can of Monster or some Monster Munch
Let’s cover the basics. Monster Ramp Racing is forty levels of undulating track, presenting as a 3D environment when it’s really a long, 2D plane. So far, so Trials. You drive a red monster truck, and your aim is to reach the end of the race without once tipping over onto your back. If you tortoise yourself, the level is over and you have to start again
Unlike Trials, you only have two buttons. One is RT, the accelerator, and this sends you hurtling up hills. You’ll be tapping this button as you move over moguls, making sure not to accelerate so fast that you flip yourself. It’s about aggressive moderation, gaining enough speed to launch over ramps but not enough to be constantly failing.
The other button is LT, which is pure chaos. It’s a brake, which makes sense, as sometimes you need to be pulling on the reins, stopping short before you sail to your doom. But it’s also a kind of fall-correction. If you’re flipping all over the place after a jump, you can use it – and, to a degree, RT – to steady yourself.
Perhaps Releasing with More than Two Buttons Would have Been Wise…
Except, after over an hour with Monster Ramp Racing, we still couldn’t tell you how it works. Not consistently, anyway. It’s not as simple as ‘LT is a clockwise correction and RT an anti-clockwise correction’. There’s some other sorcery to how it works. In essence it worked like this: we would be jumping from a ramp, approaching land in clearly the wrong orientation. So we would tap LT to see what it wants to do today. It might do nothing, so we tap RT instead. LT might even us out perfectly. Or it might accelerate the rotation, essentially making it a coin-flip about whether we survive.
Remember that one single failure is your doom. You’re starting the level all over again. Levels aren’t short, either, often being a dozen or so hazards, some of which are in close proximity. Coin-flips simply aren’t good enough when you have so many chances to fail.
Which, of course, makes Monster Ramp Racing infuriating to play. Oh, the rage I have felt playing this game. It’s entirely possible for LT and RT to behave for 90% of a race, only for them to stab you in the back on the last ramp. Nobody deserves that.
To Monster Ramp Racing’s credit, the tracks would have been halfway decent if it wasn’t so erratic. We can imagine a version that lets you use the analogue stick, as well as the shoulder triggers. It would have been magnitudes better: we would have let our latent Trials HD expert take over, and we would have got plenty of enjoyment from that £1.69.
Oh, to be playing that game. In the review of that version of the game, we would have grumbled about the pedestrian presentation and the fact that you can’t customise your car. We’d have wanted a highscore table, perhaps, or multiplayer. Those problems seem so small in comparison to this reality’s version of the game.
Microsoft Store’s Quality Control lets Them Down
We haven’t even reached Level 14 in the review. You see, you can’t actually complete Monster Ramp Racing. At Level 14 there is a broken sequence of hills that cannot be surmounted. It’s actually impossible to finish the level – there isn’t enough momentum in the world to make it feasible – so the game ends there. In a way, we were thankful.
Checking the reviews on the Xbox Store, we’re not the only ones who have had this problem. Nobody has managed to get past Level 14, which means that – some quick maths – only 35% of Monster Ramp Racing is currently available to play. We got to Level 14 after twenty minutes of play. That £1.69 becomes less and less tempting.
Broken, and Virtually Unplayable
Bugfixes may unblock Monster Ramp Racing’s Level 14, of course, but I’m not convinced the wider game can be saved. Unless Monster Ramp Racing drops its strange determination to only use two buttons – an accelerate and brake – it’s going to remain virtually unplayable. I don’t know about you, but ‘unplayable’ isn’t something I look for in a game, even when it’s £1.69.
So, what price would we have paid for Monster Ramp Racing? The answer is less than nothing. You’d better be holding bags of cash if you want us to play it again.
Important Links
Hit Huge Hills In The Pocket-Money Priced Monster Ramp Racing – https://www.thexboxhub.com/hit-huge-hills-in-the-pocket-money-priced-monster-ramp-racing/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/monster-ramp-racing/9NNSKJVN0PD7/0010
