TrackMania 2 Stadium

TrackMania 2 Stadium is Nadeo's follow-up to the legendary free-to-play TrackMania Nations Forever, rebuilt inside the ManiaPlanet platform with sharper visuals, new track blocks, and a fresh solo campaign. If you have never touched the series before, here is the pitch: you drive a single car class around increasingly wild stadium tracks packed with loop-de-loops, dirt sections, speed pads that catapult you forward, and ramps that demand near-perfect trajectory or you're watching your car sail into the void. Car-to-car collisions do not exist - opponents are effectively ghosts - so every wasted millisecond is on you alone, which is either liberating or maddening depending on your personality. The solo campaign, reportedly crafted by community track-building legend PapyChampy, gives you over 65 tracks to race across pavement, dirt, grass, and water surfaces. You chase medal times (Bronze up through the brutal Trackmaster tier) and climb regional, national, and global leaderboards after every run. Online, the two headline modes are Time Attack and Rounds. Time Attack drops a group of players on the same map with a shared timer (usually five to seven minutes) where everyone chases their personal best simultaneously. It sounds low-stakes but it absolutely is not - watching someone shave a tenth off a record mid-session and then hunting that ghost is the core loop that has kept dedicated players hooked for years. Rounds mode is closer to traditional racing, laps-first-wins, and rounds out the competitive side nicely. For controls, keyboard works fine at entry level, but a gamepad genuinely improves precision since individual inputs are analogue rather than binary. Racing wheels with force feedback are supported too, though the arcade physics mean a wheel is more for fun than competitive edge. Speaking of fun: the "four friends on one PC" fantasy hits a wall here. Split-screen was removed in a platform update years ago and, despite community outcry, was never fully restored in the main client. Workarounds exist through older ManiaPlanet builds but they are fiddly. This is an online-or-solo machine, not a couch-party racer. The game's biggest weakness in 2025 is context. The TM2 player base has fragmented across the newer free-to-play Trackmania (Ubisoft Connect) and the older Nations Forever crowd, so finding packed servers takes more effort than it once did - though community-run servers and ManiaPlanet channels still keep things breathing. The track editor is powerful and the community around Mania Exchange has an enormous back catalogue of user-made maps, so content supply is not the problem. The interface, however, remains as confusing as ever, and new players will spend time learning what Ladder Points, Skill Points, and ManiaPlanet titles even mean before the fun really clicks. Bottom line from me: if you enjoy the idea of shaving hundredths off a personal best and watching your world rank tick upward, this is one of the most satisfying loops in arcade racing, full stop. The solo campaign alone earns its price of entry, and the online community is small but genuinely welcoming. Just go in knowing this is a precision time-trial game dressed as a racer, not a party game, and absolutely not a sim.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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