Monster Truck Championship

My Saturday night crew and I have a rule: if a racing game can't survive a living room full of snacks and strong opinions, it goes back on the shelf. Monster Truck Championship mostly survives, but it earns its place through the strength of one very specific thing - the trucks themselves actually feel like trucks. Teyon went sim-leaning here, which is not the obvious choice for a genre that most developers treat as pure arcade candy. The result is a handling model that takes real work to appreciate. These machines want to understeer, oversteer, and bounce at every opportunity. Independent rear-wheel steering is mapped to the right stick on a controller and is genuinely useful in freestyle events for threading tight lines, even if it feels awkward mid-race. The throttle is your best friend and your worst enemy at the same time - feathering it through corners is a skill that takes a few sessions to build. Force-feedback wheel support is there for the committed sim heads, and cranking the difficulty up with a wheel in cockpit view does give you a meaningfully different, harder challenge. Casual players can dial things back with ABS toggling, transmission aids, and adjustable AI difficulty, which keeps the entry barrier reasonable. Career mode is where you will spend most of your hours. You build a team from scratch, chase sponsorships, spend winnings on engine, brakes, transmission, tires, and suspension upgrades across six garage categories, and work through three leagues toward a championship finals. The progression loop is solid and the truck customization goes deep enough that two players on the same track can be running very different setups. Quick Play lets you jump into standalone race, time trial, drag race, freestyle, or destruction events without touching career, which is exactly what you want for a casual session. Online supports up to seven or eight opponents, and that is where the AI limitations stop mattering - the solo AI is polite to the point of being forgettable, so the game gets noticeably more interesting against real people. No split-screen local multiplayer is the real party-night killer here, and that is worth flagging loudly if your plan was couch co-op. The content ceiling is low and critics have said so consistently. The visuals are functional rather than impressive, and the 25 arenas spread across US stadium venues do not generate enough variety to mask the repetition once you have been through a league or two. There is no replay mode either, which feels like a genuine miss for a game built around truck theatrics. The OpenCritic consensus landed in the mid-60s to low-70s range, which about matches what the game deserves. It is not broken, it is not sloppy, it is just narrow. The sim ambition is real and the core driving is worth respecting, but the content and production values are AA at best, which is fine as long as the price reflects that. If you are a monster truck fan who has been waiting for something more serious than the Monster Jam arcade titles, this genuinely fills that gap. If you are a casual racing fan looking for a rowdy, accessible time with friends in the same room, the lack of local multiplayer is going to sting. Pick it up at a discount and you will get your money's worth. Full price is a tougher ask unless the niche really speaks to you.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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