Monster Jam Showdown Review (PS5): I Wish I Had This When I Was a Kid

How does it play?

So what is Monster Jam Showdown, exactly, for those who never dabbled? Well, there's nothing too complex about it. It's made after the real action-packed Monster Jam motorsport where highly skilled drivers get in their 10.5 ft-tall (3.2m), 12.5-ft-wide (3.81), 17-ft long (5.18m), and 12,000 pounds (5,443 kg) monster trucks with 1,500 horsepower and drive their hearts out.

More importantly, Monster Jam fans will recognize the virtual counterparts of the real-life trucks, such as Alien Invasion, Axe, Bakugan Dragonoid, Dragon, Grave Digger, El Toro Loco, Blue Thunder, Jurassic Attack, Kraken, Monster Mutt Dalmatian, Pirate's Curse, Max-D, and two of my personal favorites, Megalodon and Zombie.

With Season Passes and whatnot, there will be 66 trucks, including historic vehicles and toys, but the base game only features 40 trucks. The remaining 26 will arrive through free or paid DLC. They also come with an assortment of liveries or skins and have levels that provide XP or score bonuses.

Simply put, they're all the same aside from names and looks, but the bonuses they offer set them apart. For example, at Level 3, Megalodon provides a 150% bonus to Drift Stunt Score. Blue Thunder at Lvl. 3 gives a 250% bonus to the Destruction Stunt Score. Others, simply award extra XP (experience points) if you use them in one of the three main regions: Colorado, Death Valley, or Alaska.

While they all have the same weighty driving feeling and handling, it's not a knock against the game design for not adopting the typical acceleration, handling, and top-speed meters you find in racing games. If anything, it levels the playing field and makes you learn the mechanics better.

Trying each of them out as soon as you unlock one is rewarding in and of itself. Some, like Zombie, are best used for drifting bonuses, which helps a lot during races and stunt arenas. So you'll switch pretty often between them depending on the map and type of race or event.

The single-player mode is right on the money, and I found no fault with its design. It's as basic as can be, with no story, but in a good way. There are various events, like Head-to-Head, Circuit, Figure 8 Racing, or Horde. My favorite was the latter, where two trucks are "the hunters," trying to capture the others by driving in front of them to fill up a meter.

The stunt arena events unexpectedly knocked my socks off. When I first heard of them, I rolled my eyes and uttered, "Dear God." But it's basically like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, where you perform tricks and try to beat the high score from AI opponents. The trick is to chain stunts and tricks together without ending up like a turtle on your back.

In that case, you will lose everything and inevitably start mashing the Restart option. Every timed arena event had me on the edge of my beanbag chair, fully focused on the task. And as far as the list of tricks goes, it's massive. You have your garden variety Base Stunts, followed by Mega Stunts, but if you're really good at your job, you'll attempt to pull off Ultra Stunts.

The single-player game modes fall into three main, pretty self-explanatory categories: Racing, Stunt, and Short. You start with a handful of races, and as you acquire tokens from finishing in the top three spots, you'll unlock more regions and boss fights. The sweet part about bosses is that you keep the model you fight after you win.

Showdown has four difficulty settings. The easiest one, "101" difficulty, is for people who have never touched a controller. It is full of driving aids that help players drive, drift, and corner. Then, there's Easy, Showdown, and Extreme. This being my first Monster Jam title, I didn't dare pick the last one, but I chose Showdown and found the balance perfect. Even more so, the further I progressed, the more I felt it challenging me.

It took me about an hour to get used to the rear-axle steering activated via the right stick from the DualSense controller, which acts more like an honorary drift stick than a second steering wheel. The monster trucks never get over 100 mph, aside from when you're boosting, so the tracks are short, sweet, and full of turns. Make sure you learn how to drift properly because you'll do so for 90% of every race.

The transmission is in semi-automatic mode by default, but you can change that to manual in the settings, along with the AI difficulty. There's even a Game Speed slider at 100% by default, which you can turn down to 70%. Every game should feature this option as a standard, to help people new to gaming, aging players, those who suffered injuries or can't button-press lightning-fast anymore.

As for the multiplayer, the split-screen is fun, and the overall system works, but it doesn't overflow with innovation, aside from supporting cross-play. There are roughly eight game modes, which add an extra layer of spiciness to the regular counterparts. This includes Extreme Head-to-Head and Freestyle, Best Trick, Circuit Racing, Figure 8 Racing, Survivor, Horde, and Treasure Hunting. In a nutshell, the online component is Monster Jam with friends, or foes—and it doesn't need to be more than that.

I played it on the aging PS5, so I have some comments about the console version. Graphically, it looks great, although apart from the real-life-inspired truck models, nothing stands out, even though it's been developed in Unreal Engine 5. The lighting looks good, and the textures, shaders, car models, map geometry, physics, and special effects are all fine and dandy.

More importantly, performance-wise, it ran like a 60fps dream with crystal-clear visuals. The HDR feature or the color pallet are nothing to write home about, but they serve their purpose well. The pre-release version I played was bug-free, except for one annoying visual problem involving puddles from a couple of maps. Other than that, I experienced nothing ominous, such as frame drops, crashes, errors, freezes, micro-stutters, or anything of the sort.

As far as the Playstation 5 DualSense controller features go, I wouldn't say I was enamored with them. The triggers do their usual thing and "put up a fight" with your finger, so acceleration literally feels rough. There's nothing bad about it, but it's not impressive either. Luckily, you can fiddle with the Trigger Effect Function and Vibration in the Controls menu. The sound coming from the controller's speaker also wasn't anything flattering.

The Bad and the Ugly

The music was just a noisy mess to my ears. It might be because I'm getting old and don't understand what the TikTok younglings are even listening to these days. Or maybe it's just bad across the board, and that's the end of that. To me, it sounded like a bunch of sentient empty cans screaming for their lives while waiting their turn to be turned into shrapnel by a mechanized grinder.

Descriptive, I know, but that's the image my ears got. I bet it was the same with our parents while we were playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX, Need for Speed Underground, Most Wanted, etc.

The only bug I encountered was the strange blinding glare I mentioned earlier on certain maps with puddles. For some reason, the glare or reflection from the puddle took up almost a third of my screen, and I couldn't see where I was driving during that portion. I highly doubt "it's a feature, not a bug," and I expect it to be fixed shortly after release, if not sooner.