I don’t know much about the world of monster trucks. I didn’t even know there was a league – Major League of Monster Trucks – until this review. What I do know, and what many kids learned during the 1980s, is that Bigfoot is awesome. After cranking up Monster Jam: Urban Assault, I skipped the speedster, smasher, and stuntman modes in favor of the world series. I didn’t have time to mess around; I needed to take Bigfoot to the top - with extreme prejudice.

Throwing in my lot for the long haul, I was then presented with the truck selection screen. Huh? No Bigfoot? What other trucks were there…let’s see, Scarlet Bandit? Ha! Grave Digger? Pft. Then I hit it: Maximum Destruction. That sounded like it might approach the appropriate level of destruction. Maximum Destruction it was.

After such careful deliberation, I was disappointed to realize that I had put way too much thought into the selection process. The trucks are different in name and design only; there are no stats to speak of and throughout I did the same – awesome - despite the truck used. If there were differences between the vehicles, it would be pushing it to call them minor.

The modes might sound the same, but they tend to fall into three types: race, stunt, and jump. The world series includes freestyle and stadium racing – crushing and racing, respectively. Speedster consists of circuit race, eliminator, and head to head – standard racing, last truck loses, and two trucks racing towards each other. Smasher has what you would expect, the break-everything devastator mode and the ramp-jumpin’ airstrike. Then there is stuntman, which includes monster jump, trickster, and skill jump; jump involves distance and damage, trickster is for score by stunts and damage, and skill jump is a pretty hilarious skee-ball course. Name aside, you will have a hard time telling the differences between several of the modes.

What stands out the most isn’t how similar all of the modes and sub modes are, but how easy the game is. A few hours will net you first place in every event. Unlike Tony Hawk and other point- and combo-based sports titles, Monster Jam is very forgiving in both the time allotted to link moves and what the game considers a trick. Something as simple as driving over a tree will earn you points for destroying the tree, the air caught from riding over its base, and any sort of slight turn done while in the air. Any move can be easily linked into a donut or a wheelie, which eventually adds multipliers to the ever-increasing score. The points earned – monster points – go towards spectacle points and the prize they bestow, nitro boosts. An easy way to cheese your way through point-based objectives is to ride up or hit anything to build up boost, and then boost forward to ride on the front two wheels and jerk backwards for a wheelie. Repeat. This might be considered cheating, if you didn’t receive points from simply falling off of structures.

For all of your efforts, you get new trucks to choose from, full-motion clips of moderate quality to view, and loading. Lots of loading. You also get bland graphics, which can get downright ugly indoors. Confined locations in general play havoc with the camera; the view tends to rest over ceilings until the truck moves enough to jolt the camera into realignment. All of this is going on while barely audible rock plays in the background and an announcer repeats a handful of lines. Excitement is in short supply.

The courses are decent for the most part. As you might expect, the more indoor portions a level has the less enjoyable it is, with the mall being the worst course by far. The skee-ball track is surreal and some of the more wide-open courses allow you to cut loose, but they can also be confusing with turns that are often noticed too late. Combine the uneven design with a pretty lackluster sense of speed – they are monster trucks, after all – and the racing portions are so-so while the demolition modes depend on courses of low to moderate quality. Monster Jam: Urban Assault is a budget title that, sadly, feels like a budget title.

Overall: 4.5/10