Battle Scars, enjoyable track or leaving you scarred for life?

Time for a review of the second track listed on the showcase at the TMX website this week, I introduce you to "Battle Scars" a speed tech track built by Tomdeos.

First of all i'll tell a little story; when i first started playing Trackmania Nations in 2006, i was only capable of posting good lap times on full speed tracks and i never was able to be successful at my attempts on tech tracks. It was only a few months ago or so that i started being capable of posting good times on speed tech tracks despite being at least a second or so off the pace of the pro times on a typical tech track with at least 45-60 secs of lap time.
I used to hate tech tracks, bloody hate them.

It all changed when i realised that only being expectational at full speed tracks wouldn't keep me in the UKR main team when we were starting to get quite a few good players coming through the ranks, so i started to seriously give practicing tech tracks a go and it turned out that they weren't so bad as i thought they would be.

Dear me i must stop waffling on about myself, when i should be reviewing this track. Lets get on with this then.
The first corners are quite difficult to judge for a beginner to get some speed going while navigating through this section and as you can see, this is a essentially a square U turn and it can be tough to judge this corner to maximise your speed going out of the corner exit to the next few full speed corners. Easy for everyone to go through this corner yet hard for the beginners to do it quickly.

The next 2 major corners are where you need to drift to achieve a good time, the great classic tech tracks always have a couple of drifting corners so the pro players gets a far more wider margin of time compared to the newer players so this ticks the box thus far.
The first corner is more lenient and you only really to let go of the accelerator a bit to take this corner nice and tight whereas the more advanced players should drift a bit here, then you go full speed up until to the point where you need to slow down for the sharper "L" left turn, drifting this corner well will truly ensure you get a good lap time.


The next few corners up until to the road after the ramp are virtually full speed, and the good players should be able to take this full speed.
Though it all depends on how well you exit from the previous sharp left corner to enable you to process through the tricky corner into the full speed corners with as much speed as possible.
The ramp jump is a very nice touch to the track and it seems so far that the track is pretty well marked with signs so it is easy for people on their first try to know where to go.


The last 2 corners of this track, and personally my favourite section of the whole lot.
After that ramp jump, you have to slow just a smidgen then enter the jump with as speed as much speed possible and you automatically enter into a drift mode depending how you landing.
Keep your turn as smooth as possible as you go through the finish line. For the beginners, they should let go of the accelerator a bit to avoid under steering the corner.

Time to conclude the review, in all this is an extremely well built speed tech track with the signs in the correct place and highly visible. Another plus in my book is how few scenery there are and low in copper usage, so it is easier on the graphic card to cope.
I cannot honestly find any faults with the track, excellent flow and cornering throughout.
I award the track a nice 9/10 and a spanking nice award on the TMX website to top it off.

Here is a video of one of my lap attempts on this track.