Long-time readers of my blog probably weren't expecting a review of a game like this. Monster trucks have never been my thing, and this is a game that I would never have touched on my own. But now I'm also a father of a young son, who absolutely loves monster trucks. When I saw that this game was discounted 40% for a holiday sale, I bought it for him as a Christmas present -- in 2024 ... and oh my god, it's already next Christmas! Where does the time go? Anyway, he's still too young to really understand how to play video games, but he at least enjoys driving the trucks around in circles, or watching his parents play the game for him. I'm sure he'll grow into it.
While playing the game for him in an attempt to unlock some extra playable trucks, I realized that the game is kind of like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but with monster trucks. And I love the Tony Hawk games! So I went ahead and tried playing Monster Jam: Showdown, off and on, on my own account as well. While there is definitely fun to be had with Showdown, it is definitely not Tony Hawk!
Showdown has the potential to be "Tony Hawk, but with Monster Trucks"!
Moon physics
Tony Hawk, as a series of games, was a breakout hit, in large part, because it appealed to a wide variety of gamers, including many (like myself) who didn't give a shit about skateboarding. It accomplished this by having extremely tight, responsive controls and easily-understandable physics, that allowed players to enter a zen-like state in which we felt like unstoppable skateboarding gods -- even if we couldn't tell a kickflip from a manual.
This is not the case with Monster Jam: Showdown. The gameplay here is exceedingly arcadey. The trucks in the game just don't have the sense of weight and physicality that one might expect from the 6-ton motor behemoths that they are based on. These trucks often feel like they are on the moon, and the physics is horribly inconsistent, unpredictable, and prone to screwing the player over every chance it gets.
Incidental collisions with level geometry can
send the truck flying into the air.
Running over or clipping geometry in the arena could send the truck flying into the air. Taking a turn a little too hot and clipping the rocky wall of a racing circuit can launch the truck into a flip. Running over a football-sized rock on the side of the track can pop the truck off the road and flip it over. Stunts as simple as running over and smashing a line of cars can be frustratingly difficulty, as hitting the first car can send the truck flying 30 feet into the air, missing all the other cars, and landing on its back. Even at low speeds, it's almost impossible to tell if you'll run over the cars, or go flying into the sky, or roll over onto your side. It's also annoyingly easy to get stuck in flips, or in cycles of "break-dancing", in which the truck just keeps flipping around on the ground doing various "sidewall" spins on 2 tires.
In one instance, I hit a jump at the end of the last lap of a race, only to hit an invisible wall at the top of the jump that sent my truck spiraling out of control and landing upside down on the other side. Respawning the truck put me back at the foot of the ramp without enough room to actually clear the jump, so I had to back up a bit to give myself extra room to get up to speed. Needless to say, I went from 1st place to last place completely without cause.
In other instances, trucks will get stuck on other trucks or on parts of the geometry. Grazing a wall of a race circuit or stunt arena can bring your truck to a sudden stop. Bumping or side-swiping another truck in a race can also cause both trucks to get stuck on each other and slow both down. Navigating a crowded corner in a race, or a trying to make a tight maneuver in limited space just becomes a crap shoot. Being just a few pixels off-target can make the difference between a perfect maneuver or stalling completely.
Navigating crowded circuits can be annoying.
These trucks can also be very hard to keep in a straight line, and will easily lift up onto 2 or 1 tire when turning or accelerating. Once the tires leave the ground, the trucks will get stuck in animations of a wheelie or bicycle stunt, whether you wanted to perform that stunt or not. Stuff like this makes it very difficult to simply navigate around a stunt arena, or to line yourself up with a ramp.
I get that this is an arcade monster truck game that is intended for kids. It isn't a simulation game. But even when compared to other arcade stunt games (like Tony Hawk), Monster Jam: Showdown's arcade physics just feel too floaty and unstable. Executing a trick like a wheelie or bicycle should require more assertive and deliberate action from the player, and shouldn't be happening while simply trying to take a corner or line up with a ramp.
Help wanted
To the game's credit, there are a considerable number of assist features, but many of these only make the game harder in different ways, instead of making the game easy. The steering assist allows my 4-year-old to run a race while just holding down the gas, without actually having to turn the wheels at all. But it also is so aggressive about keeping the truck on the center of the track that it completely prevents the player from being able to access any of the shortcuts, or to run into destructible objects. Worse, yet, the steering assist is bugged on some tracks. There's a track in Death Valley that has a metal ramp at the very end of the circuit that jumps the trucks over the lower track. The steering assist routinely steers the truck towards the right edge of this ramp, causing the truck to hit a lip on the edge of the ramp and be unable to successfully make the jump. This particular circuit is almost impossible to complete with the assists on -- let alone get 1st place.
There is a robust suite of assist features, but some of them are actually liabilities.
To make matters a little worse, these settings are kind of hidden. You won't find them in the regular "Settings" screen. Instead, you'll find them in a Settings screen when selecting a specific event from the campaign screen, or in the Pause menu's Settings screen within an actual event.
Jank aside, I think the assist features are a great idea. They make the game playable for young children or people with disabilities, while only requiring them to make minimal inputs on the controller. They also don't provide the player with an actual advantage against other players (or even the CPU drivers). You can play the game with the assists on, and probably be competitive, but you're probably not going to get 1st place. It's basically a "baby mode", but not an "automatic win" mode.
Monster grind-a-thon
I could probably get used to the janky physics, and maybe even come to tolerate it. But the thing that really sinks this game, for me, is the lackluster campaign. It's grindy and repetitive. There are 3 regions available (a fourth is paid DLC), and each region has 4 sub-regions. Each of those sub-regions has a series of events, but they all take place on, like, 2 tracks. Multiple events will re-use the same small tracks.
The events kind of get repetitive on their own. But having to race the same track over and over again, just with occasional variations in weather, or with different bonus objectives, gets old fast.
Add to all that the fact that I often have to redo every event multiple times due to the aforementioned janky physics, and the entire campaign starts to feel grindy just a couple hours in. The stunt events and figure-eight circuit races are the worst offenders.
The stunt events are actually my favorite events in the game to play, especially the "Best Trick" events. "Best Trick" gives a list of 3 tricks that you can perform to get bonus multipliers. Whenever you perform one of those tricks, it gets rotated with a new trick for you to do. These events are also often themed around a particular type of trick or set of tricks to combo, like a "big air" event that will repeatedly ask you to do big air jumps, perfect landings, and things like air wheelies.
Even though I enjoy playing these events, I always have to do the stunt events multiple times just to learn the layout of the arena (since there's no practice mode that I could find), and then I have to do trial-and-error to find a good pattern of trick combos to follow in that arena. Even then, I will also often have to replay the event anyway because my combo will get broken by an unlucky physics collision that will flip my truck, or send me airborne without counting it as a stunt.
Stunts can be strung together by drifting, and other such stunts, to create high-scoring combos.
The trick combo system is, thankfully, very forgiving. Just like how a Tony Hawk game might let you keep a combo going by doing a "manual" (basically a skateboard wheelie), Monster Jam: Showdown also has ground-based tricks like drifting, doughnuts, "destruction" (running over or smashing things in the arena), and so forth. The game includes a generous time window between tricks, in which to keep your combo going.
This is also where one of the game's coolest features does come into play: the ability to use the right analog stick to steer the truck with the rear tires! Being able to steer with either (or both) the front and rear tires allows the player to easily go into drifts. It also makes doughnuts very easy to execute. Steering with the back tires is useful in racing events as well (in fact, it seems to be necessary to compete for first in harder events), but I find that it is most effective in the stunt events.
While these stunt events can be annoying to have to re-do over and over again, I absolutely hate the Figure 8 Circuit Racing events! The Figure 8 Circuit races basically expose all of the problems and frustrations that I have with this game in one single type of event. They take place in very tight, crowded spaces. Barely tapping a wall will spin you around and knock you out of the race. The whole event is specifically designed to force side-on crashes. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the point of the event were to wreck the trucks (like a destruction derby), but this is a race! A race that is specifically designed to be a total crap shoot. If the first-place truck gets out ahead of the pack, it can be almost impossible to catch up to it, and the clusters of trucks that you have to pass seem to deliberately go slower and block the entire road. This forces you to ram their rear, which just slows both of you down more, and potentially spins both of you out. It's just awful in every conceivable way, and I hate it.
Figure 8 Circuit events seem designed to be infuriating!
As I mentioned before, maybe I shouldn't be taking the game so seriously. After all, it's an arcade monster truck game designed for kids. But at the end of the day, the event is still a race, and the goal is to win it. So that's what I'm trying to do, and it just feels awful!
A little bit of bait-and-switch
I also have some mixed feelings about this game's DLC and monetization model, but I think it's overall one of the less offensive games in this regard. There are DLC trucks (and a DLC map expansion), but the base game includes a large assortment of trucks (over 40). The DLC are mostly reserved for novelty trucks and some alternate skins (such as Grave Digger Anniversary skins and some vintage truck models).
This is mostly fine, especially considering that the base game is only $50 (instead of the $60 or $70 that most companies are asking for new console games). And I bought it on sale for about $30.
What I don't appreciate is how this game shows all of its DLC trucks in the list of playable trucks as if they are already unlocked and available to play. They aren't hidden in a DLC menu, or even grayed-out. As I was scrolling through the list of trucks, my 3-year-old son saw me scroll past the anniversary Grave Diggers, and he started screaming to play the Grave Diggers. Of course, I hadn't even unlocked the regular Grave Digger yet (I only had the default classic Grave Digger unlocked). I tried asking my son if it was OK to play with Sparkle Smash or Zombie (2 of his other favorite trucks), but he wanted Grave Digger. So I had to go to the Play Station store and shell out $5 to buy the damn DLC trucks.
DLC trucks look like they are unlocked and playable in the truck-select menu.
From then on, whenever I played with my son, I made sure to play OFFLINE, so that the DLC trucks would not show up in the list, and thus protecting myself from having to dump any more money into DLC.
As for the trucks that are included in the retail game, some of the most popular monster trucks in the game are locked behind difficult or time-consuming milestones or challenges. For example, Grave Digger and Megalodon are unlocked by reaching levels 30 and 40 respectively, which requires dozens of hours of play, and winning lots of events. And El Toro Loco requires coming in first place in almost every event on one of the specific maps. Years ago, I probably wouldn't mind this. It makes ludic sense to lock highly-desired items as rewards for completionist players. The players who put the most into the game should get the best rewards.
But it's kind of amazing how being a parent has changed my perspective on a lot of common video game design philosophies. I didn't buy this game for myself; I bought it for my 3-year-old son. While I was able to unlock some of his favorite trucks easily, such as Max-D, Sparkle Smash, and Zombie, most of the other trucks remained inaccessible to him. Even with all of the assist features enabled, he's not winning any events. His mother and I had to play a lot of the events for him just to try to unlock a few trucks. It sucks that getting to those other popular trucks, so that he can drive them around in the training arena, requires so much grinding from us. At least older games like Tony Hawk, that had similar unlock and progression mechanics, usually also came with cheat codes to unlock specific characters, or to unlock all characters. Nowadays, that sort of thing usually requires a charge to your credit card.
The game is forthcoming about the exact requirements for unlocking each and every truck.
These things suck. But it could be worse. A lot worse.
At least everything in the game is unlockable by playing the game! Trucks like Grave Digger are not locked behind rare loot box drops, expensive premium currency, or other, more egregiously-predatory micro-transaction economies. The game tells you exactly how to unlock each and every truck.
Not my cup of tea
Maybe I'm not the best person to look to for an opinion on a game like this. I'm not a monster truck or Monster Jam fan. I have no idea what a fan of the sport might be looking for in a video game. I bought this for my 3-year-old son. If not for him, I would have no idea what a Grave Digger is.
All I can say is that Monster Jam: Showdown is an OK arcade X-sport game. It's playable, and it can be fun. But it's also grindy, repetitive, and full of physics jank. If you're like me, and expecting "Tony Hawk Pro Skater, but with monster trucks", you will likely be disappointed.
If you like your motor sport loud and muddy, then Monster Jam: Showdown might be the game for you!