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The game itself has two modes, career and multiplayer. In both modes, there are a number of game types available, from levels where players do tricks in their trucks to win the event, or race around against other trucks, or perform challenges in a certain amount of time, or combinations of all three. In addition, there is an experience system in Monster Jam whereby you can purchase upgrades for your truck, and eventually unlock new trucks with even better stats. The new vehicles don’t significantly decrease the difficulty of driving a monster truck around, but they do allow for a little bit of change in how your chosen vehicle drives and handles.

Learning to handle your beast won’t be especially easy, either. There are two control configurations, Wii Remote held horizontally like a Wii-wheel, or Wii Remote held with the nunchuck. The second is the better choice of the two, as the horizontal configuration is sluggish and will only hinder your learning to drive a monster truck, which isn’t the easiest thing in the world anyway. Picking it up will take you a little time, so you might as well learn in the simplest way possible. Once you get it down, though, you’ll be amazed at the amount of control over your truck the difficult control scheme allows.

There is one thing about the control scheme that has been made relatively idiot-proof, however. That is that there is a single button that will allow you to respawn in case you happened to have lost control of your ride. This can help alleviate the frustration you’ll feel when you’re just learning.

The graphics here are good, but they’re not excellent. Backgrounds and pretty much anything that’s not a truck are all pretty low resolution, but the monster trucks themselves are rendered beautifully. If you wanted to play the game to get a really up-close look at the inside of a monster truck arena, well, you’re going to be disappointed.

Overall, there are a lot of good things to be said about Monster Jam: Path of Destruction. The game is a pretty accurate depiction of what it’s like to drive a monster truck around an arena. That being said, even people that own monster trucks don’t drive them around all the time, and after a few rings around the course you might just find that those trucks don’t have the monster appeal you thought they did.