Monster 4x4: Masters of Metal

Monster 4x4 is pretty short on features - simple exhibition races in the few different formats, for both single and multiplayer (as if you'd want to show this to friends, better off showing them good multiplayer games, like Сbeat the crap out of the guy who bought this'), and a career mode. The career mode stars you, or more specific, СRookie', who starts at the bottom of the ranks and works his way up. The career spans numerous US cities (because the rest of the world is smart enough to avoid watching this stuff), in 3 different kinds of events - straight races, checkpoint battles, and a special trick level. Each one is sponsored by different people, who you interact with; a regular monster truck guy for the regular races, a mobster who organizes the checkpoint races (seriously, the mob likes monster trucks! Capone would be playing twister in his grave knowing this), and a redneck cowboy who looks like Avery Carrington from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City runs the special trick sections. Once you clear a city, you move on until you clear them all, which takes maybe a few hours, and you're all done.

The different races are at least able to break up what's already pretty lifeless; regular races are just laps around a track in an 8 truck tournament style, one on one until you win in the finals, the checkpoint races are huge courses where you must pick up the majority of checkpoints (think Bling Bling Scramble from GTA III), and the special trick requires you to do a requested trick in a set period, be it fly through a ring of fire, etc. As you progress, you earn money to upgrade your truck, adding nitro, different tires, etc. Very basic, but at least it's an attempt to add a bit of depth to a game that has pretty much none.

From reading, you probably get an impression that the game isn't all that bad. Well, you have to sit down and play it to actually realize how bad it is. The first strike - it's awfully easy. While nitro and the upgrades are to make your truck better - it's unnecessary. In each of the standard races, I won every single time, without ever using nitro, and pretty much lapped the competition every single race. Seriously, the only way to lose these races is to get stuck on some terrain off the track and be unable to escape it - which happens more than you'd like seeing as the controls are so damn rotten that it's like controlling a truck with 2 wheels.

It gets worse. The checkpoint races could be fun, racing against other trucks to get the most checkpoints. But, when they have the intelligence of a 3-month-old baby, there's nothing fun about it. Quite literally, a checkpoint appeared next to a handful of opponents, while I was a fair distance off - and nobody picked it up. They actually drove away from it! This happened pretty much every single time I did a race of this ilk. It's as if they're making you hate this game, it acts so dumb half the time. The special trick events are only redeeming because there's no mentally deficient AI, but all of them are pretty mind-bendingly easy.

The only thing Monster 4x4 is good for is a laugh, as the ridiculous cutscenes and awful AI make for a humorous night in Bad Game Design 101. The fact that the game can be beaten in a couple of hours at the longest because you'll never once have to repeat a race or event as long as you don't let the bad controls screw you up doesn't help, and the game simply has no value other than the unintentional comedy. Bad controls, bad AI, short gametime = one bad game.

Visually, Monster 4x4 has its moments, but it's still not superb. The monster trucks are designed well enough, and most of the arenas are actually pretty decent looking, and the game runs at a nice smooth framerate. A few areas are full of dark colors and muddy textures, but on the whole, you've seen a lot worse. It's the character animations that are downright hilarious. Your own character, who I've named Сflathead' is just step one - imagine yourself, with your head stuck in a vise for hours, and you've got flathead. Seriously, he looks like a WWE Smackdown created wrestler gone wrong, skinny enough to fall through a sewer grate. And he has only one freakin' animation, I think. Other characters that interact in cutscenes and such look just as humorous, and hopefully we'll get a "Flatheads" cartoon on Comedy Central some day. It'll be a hit!

The usual generic rock soundtrack rounds out the wholly generic game that Monster 4x4 is, fitting, and perhaps welcome, but forgettable nonetheless. Some decent engine sounds and screaming crowds in stadium races add touches, but the laughably bad voice acting (especially the announcer guy in the stadium tracks, he sounds like he'd rather be pinned to a wall and have rusty nails thrown into his eyes than be here in this game) that's about on par with the original Resident Evil pretty much is the final nail in the coffin of this particular game. I'd rather watch that damned Quiznos commercial on loop than hear this again.