Earlier this year my wife and I took our kids to their very first Monster Jam show and they absolutely loved it. I haven’t been to a Monster Jam show since I was a child, so I was just as excited as my kids to be there. As soon as we heard and felt those truck engines blasting in the stadium we all had massive smiles on our faces. Something about that engine sound and the spectacle of these massive trucks rolling, flipping, and crushing things brings out a primal feeling of joy deep in you.

With our new found love of Monster Trucks, I was looking forward to sitting with my son and playing Monster Jam Showdown to get some of that fun back while we wait for the next real show in our area. Can it live up to the excitement of the real thing? Well, I’ll just say no because how can it? However, is it a fun filler until you can get back to the real thing? Let’s find out.

Monster Jam Showdown is an arcade racer that has what you love about Monster Jam and then some. Not only will you play the typical freestyle trick shows, best trick, and head-to-head track races, but there is also standard circuit races with a career mode to work through. There are ten total modes with the entire fleet of current legendary trucks as well as the fictional trucks from the toy lines with 140 liveries to unlock for the trucks as you play.

The Monster Jam Showdown Tour is where my son and I immediately jumped in. This mode is the career mode where you’ll do most of the unlocking of collectibles and other trucks. There are three major biomes to choose from: Death Valley, Colorado, and Alaska. All of these settings are clearly vastly different and each will have certain trucks that are better suited for these environments. If you want bonus points, the game encourages you to switch between different trucks since each truck offers different bonuses to biome and mode types. Each of the biomes will also have four different region areas within it.

We started out in Colorado where the tracks are filled with trees, rocks, mud, and pockets of large puddles. Figuring out the driving for the first time was a bit tough, for multiple reasons. First reason, these trucks will literally stick together when colliding side to side and for some reason and will not separate without massive effort. Not sure if that is a physics issue, but it is frustrating. Second reason, we didn’t realize we had the drive assist settings on and that honestly messed us up more than anything. See, I found out that the default easy to medium settings has such an aggressive drive assist you can simply hold the gas and it will turn and do everything for you. Without knowing that, my son and I were raging at why the controls were not doing what we wanted and seemed like it was fighting us. It felt worse using even the low assist settings than turning all of them completely off.

Third reason, well, now we don’t have any assists so we found at that these trucks will slip, slide, and spin out with the slightest amount of acceleration. I thought maybe it was because we were in the muddy wet hills, but they basically handle this way in all the environments. I’m not sure if this is accurate to how these behemoths actually operate, but it takes a bit to get used to.

Each area will feature a main race map that will be re-used a couple of times for different kinds of modes. You’ll have the same map for the main circuit races, but maybe they will reverse the map, or add in some sort of heavy weather condition like a blizzard. Then there will be a Figure 8 mode map which will be a smaller figure 8 shaped map modeled for the region. Then there will be a map for the Head-to-Head races which will be the same arena you’ll also do your Freestyle and other trick modes in, just obviously laid out for a race instead of the trick ramps and such.

This is perhaps my most disappointing aspect of Monster Jam Showdown is the lack of map variety. I did enjoy the maps that are there I just wanted more of them. They offer cool jumps and things to destroy for extra money, but recycling the same maps just gets stale. Sure there will be a sand storm in the race now, or the map will be backwards or something, but its the same map and its used for multiple event types.

Visually, Monster Jam Showdown is good looking. The details in the trucks are fantastic as well as the maps themselves. Each map has some good texture work with the different environments of snow, mud, and sand and the build up of each on the trucks as they race is a nice detail. However, there are quite a few visual bugs that happen with the tire tracks, and lighting reflecting off wet surfaces. There is an eyesore of a bug where the light reflecting off a puddle will become a massive white spot on the screen that blocks anything that it is in front of. While the maps do look good, I just wish there was variety within each biome.

Sound design, like the visuals initially impresses by getting you pumped hearing those engines roaring, sure, nothing can replicate the real thing, but they do well here. Unfortunately, like the visuals it just lacks a bit extra. From what I can tell every truck has the same exact sound which does create that ear blasting sound effect, but from either other trucks racing constantly. Since there isn’t any engine tuning for races it just sounds like everyone is racing the same truck. It’s not a deal breaker, but after a few hours it gets kind of annoying. The soundtrack is decent, offering some good generic rock music to go with these beasts, but nothing that will get you really pumped up.

Monster Jam Showdown is a game for Monster Jam fans and that is perfectly fine and exactly what I wanted. Its not going to pull in fans of other racing games because it just simply doesn’t have enough depth, but for what it is, it is entertaining. Unfortunately, the entertainment can run a bit stale quicker that I would have liked due to a lack of variety in the tracks. 

 

Graphics: 7.5 The trucks themselves and the general look of the maps are nicely detailed, however, there are some visual oddities and lack of variety.	Gameplay: 7.5 Gameplay can take a bit of getting used to since the physics of driving these trucks is a bit wonky. Drive assist settings somehow make it worse.
Sound: 7.5 The loud rumblings from the engines are nicely recreated, unfortunately they all seem to sound the same.	Fun Factor: 7.0 If you’re a big Monster Jam fan there is some decent entertainment here, but it does get stale quickly.
Final Verdict: 7.5

Monster Jam Showdown is available now on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.

Reviewed on PlayStation 5.

A copy of Monster Jan Showdown was provided by the publisher.