My five year old saw this on sale locally and had to have it. We installed it on "his" pc, (800 Mhz), and it was painfully slow to respond. We tried it on mine (3 Ghz), and it was beautiful. The box claims the min system req's are 450 Mhz, but the recommended system req's are 900 Mhz and a 32 MB 3D graphics card.

We're at the very early stages of the game. My son's reflexes are already far better than mine, but I found the game quite addictive as well. (I'm not a gamer, myself, just his mom.) Lots of levels to work through, and the graphics are great. My son really enjoyed discovering that it let him go off track and explore the mountain ranges!

I don't know what the target age for it is, though I'm sure it's older than my son. There's nothing in it that I mind my son getting exposed to. In fact, my son claims that nobody's even driving the car, so there's not even any blood when the car wrecks!

Great fun. There may even be an element of logic to it, in the puzzles, but that's stretching it. It's obviously built for fun.

It is the best racing game ever!!! I recommend it to anyone who is looking to buy a gift for someone.

It looks like this game was made by some clever programmers with a great concept, but the final product is unpolished. For example, during the installation it asks if you want to install Direct X (which is needed to run the game), but if you answer 'yes', it says the installation is successful, but you still have to go install Direct X manually. I tried installing the game on 3 different computers, but it only worked on one. I could live with the installation hassles if the program was easier to use, but the navigation and usability is terrible. There is no online help (except for one file which describes the installation process), and no printed documentation. Switching between tracks and moving between menus was sooo slow; I spent as much time waiting as racing. I haven't tried the multiplayer feature yet. This game has great potential, but was a huge disappointment for me.

This is actually a great game! TrackMania is all about building and driving whacky tracks. This game is not about realism. It is all about fun. The best part of this game is the puzzle mode, where a number of half-built tracks are presented to the player. The player then has to complete the track and finally race the track under a certain time limit. If the track is not drivable in that time, the puzzle has not been solved correctly.

This is great fun and adictive. It is a new idea and those are rare these days. If you take this game for what it is (and that's NOT a realistic driving game) then you will have a lot of fun with it.

Recently got Trackmania on an Amazon recommendation. What a find! Less than $30. It is a cool game - very different from the usual racing games. You build your own tracks and then you can race on it, race other people's tracks and I found you can actually trade tracks with others.
Other neat featurea include the ghost racer and the puzzle game where you solve the puzzle using track pieces and then you race it.