When the offer to play Monster Jam: Showdown was thrown on the table, I was quite keen to suit up and jump into a massive 4×4 with the body of a massive skull, pulling off sick stunts and smashing giant tyres into other macabre-shaped vehicles. I mean, who wouldn’t be?
However, after entirely donning my racing gear, i.e. a pair of shorts with my butt on the couch and jumping into the game, I found myself a lot more frustrated than I had hoped.
The game’s premise is similar to that of Need for Speed: Become the best Monster Trucker in various disciplines. There’s circuit racing, head-to-head racing, and then the one we all see the ‘Muricans watching on TV: Stunts.
It’s a pretty simple structure, but I was okay with that. After all, I was looking forward to an arcade-style racing game that would let me live out my Monster Trucking dreams.
I loaded in and selected the easiest difficulty, as this would be my first time riding these iron, 5-ton giants. Don’t do this. I’ll explain why in a bit.
I went through the tutorial, which was pretty cool because it explained how each of the truck’s axes were controlled by the left and right thumb sticks for extra doughnuts and drifting skills. I thought it was cool to be able to control the sets of wheels independently to pull off different stunts or take corners at high speeds.
After about four whole minutes in the practice arena, I decided I had officially claimed my Monster Truck license.
I skipped through all the career mode explanations and went skull first into my first circuit race, deep in the Death Valley Dessert.
With the difficulty I had selected, all assists were enabled, and I quickly got annoyed that I had zero control of the vehicle. I could just hold down the R trigger on my controller and win the race, pressing no other buttons. That had to change because I wanted to cause a whole lot of mayhem on the track.
I found the sweet spot to be the Standard difficulty setting, with just a little bit of drift assistance enabled.
Even still, when a race begins, you start at the back of the pack, and if you ram straight into the back of another truck, you’re glued to it for 15 seconds while you try to push it out of the way. This made starting a race annoying – every time.
When you do finally separate yourself from the pack, though, it’s game on, and I quickly found myself enjoying sliding around corners in the behemoth of a vehicle at high speeds. Until yet another spanner was thrown into the works. Bumping any sort of rock, pothole, bollard or log on the side of the track completely throws your vehicle into disarray.
One tiny rock in the middle of the track caused me to restart my race more times than I had died during my first fight with Margit from Elden Ring.
This restarting curse occurred throughout every other circuit and head-to-head race I faced during my time with the game and completely ruined my immersion into Monster Truck heaven.
The only reprieve I got from the monotony of the Start > Restart Race > Yes > Yes > Yes mechanics of circuit racing was switching gears to a few of the stunt events.
Stunt events feel a lot like Tony Hawks, except you’ve swapped out your sleek deck for a mighty, morphin’ Monster Truck. Here, you need to perform stunts in an arena filled with ramps, cargo crates and other regular-sized cars to maximise your points scored. Some events keep your combo meter going, even if you mess a stunt up, while others require you to chain a few stunts together to max out the score.
Here, I had a lot more fun back-flipping 5 tons of beasty metal through the air than I did in the mess that was racing. Sadly, this mode also gets a bit boring after a while as there are only so many stoppies I can do before it no longer is cool.
This led me to an overall realisation. I wanted Monster Jam: Showdown to be an epic romp of heavy metal, massive tyres, and chaos, but all I got was frustration and eventual boredom, which drove me to quit the game and just play something else instead, or even worse, go outside.
I can imagine there is fun to be had for an hour or two if you have a few friends over who take turns feeling the same frustrations as you do, but I’d only ever have it as an option if it was a game I got free with the PlayStation Plus subscription.
