Monster Jam: Maximum Destruction

Destroy all the Monster Trucks.

NA release: 19th November 2002
EU release: 6th December 2002
JP release: N/A
Developer: Inland Productions
Publisher: UbiSoft
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

As far as vehicular combat games go, this is one of the worst that I’ve played. Most of the time in this game is spent slowly following your opponents until they make a mistake, allowing you to ram into them to cause a small amount of damage. While there are a large amount of monster trucks (which are all based on real ones, including a few Marvel-based ones), none of them feel different to drive. So when all the trucks drive as slowly as each other, it leads to every match feeling the same.

There are weapons in Maximum Destruction, which can be used to cause a ton of damage. Driving into another weapon will instantly replace it, erasing your previous one. One huge flaw is that weapons don’t respawn, so it doesn’t take long until all the weapons in the large but bland levels are gone, which is why there is so much time just spent driving slowly in circles. Even smashing objects feels underwhelming, with things just disintegrating in an unsatisfying way.

There are a few minigames, such as fighting in a tiny arena, racing in a tiny arena, fighting in a different tiny arena (this one with large drops off the sides) and a longer race. The longer race allows you to ignore the route on the track and skip 70% of the track and win miles ahead of everyone else. This is really dull.