Excite Truck (Wii) (gamespy)

- gamespy -

Excite Truck shares nothing with the classic NES racer of old, Excitebike, other than the fact that both games feature vehicles with tires. While the ancient 8-bit game is remembered fondly, the Wii's brand new 3D truck/SUV racing title most likely won't be remembered past the end of the year. It's not a terrible game by any means, but it simply doesn't have enough in terms of innovation, gameplay or plain old excitement to make it anything special. As it's technically the only other first-party Nintendo game for the Wii at launch, I'm more than a little disappointed with its performance. Still, fans of racing might well get a kick out of the novel controls and blistering speeds that the game has to offer.

The hook here is the new control system. You hold the Wii Remote in two hands, with the D-pad on the left and the 1 and 2 buttons on the right. The 2 button is used to accelerate and the 1 button hits the brakes. The D-pad can be pushed in any direction to trigger the turbo boost meter, but this needs to be monitored carefully for overheating -- heat can be reduced by driving through bodies of water or catching big air from jumps. Your truck can be steered left and right by tilting the Wii Remote appropriately, and the pitch of the vehicle can also be altered by tipping the controller forwards or backwards.

Excite Truck doesn't let you participate in any real racing until you've completed the first of four training modes. This takes less than five minutes but it's a little annoying not to be given a choice. It won't take you long to finish up all four training sections, by which time you'll be (hopefully) well-versed on the basic and more advanced controls. There's a "stunt" system in place, but it only really consists of learning how to pull off some rather underwhelming spin rotations in the air. Other more interesting moves teach you how to turbo-jump off of ramps and land perfectly on all four wheels, which gets you a nice turbo boost on the flats.


Once you've nailed the training stuff, you'll be able to hit either the frankly tedious two-player split-screen racing mode, or the much better single-player Excite Race and Challenge modes. The latter modes are where the core content of the game forms up. Excite Race is your standard four-cup, multiple-stage affair where the idea is to score big and come in first place to progress. The Challenge mode sees you trying to beat specific goals by smashing into other racers, jumping through rings in the air, or nailing a series of gates on the ground. It's fairly standard stuff, but on the whole, it's pretty enjoyable.

This brings me to the scoring mechanism of Excite Truck. Each race will require you to score a certain number of stars in order to beat it. There are two methods of achieving this. The first and most obvious is placing yourself in a high finishing position (e.g. come in first, and you automatically score 50 stars). The second and more interesting method is by performing certain moves and hitting certain triggers in the races themselves. It breaks down as follows. The stuff you can pull off while actually driving and earning stars includes getting huge air, pulling off large drifts, smashing other trucks, hitting a nice landing, and more besides. Items and triggers on the course also grant stars. The "morph the terrain" triggers literally cause the track to shift and change in front of you, opening up alternate routes, but more importantly, allowing you to tool CPU drivers who might be ahead of you.

The power item icon can be picked up and automatically slips you into an insanely fast temporary boost mode that makes you damn-near indestructible, and allows you to cut a path of destruction through trees and obstacles that would otherwise cause you to bail and crash. Between all of these components, this is how you'll be looking to hit the allotted star goals for the races.

And that pretty much sums up the gameplay that Excite Truck has to offer. The game has a decent selection of courses and environments to choose from, each one based on a supposed real-life location, like Scotland or Fiji. But really, the tracks could be based anywhere at all, and you'd never really know the difference -- unless you think that Scotland is the only place in the world that might have a castle. Some courses are more fun than others. For example, the snow and ice-based courses are a pain in the arse compared to the lush green and brown courses that sport forest tracks and small bodies of water. There are a number of different routes that can be taken on each locational environment, and for the most part, these locales are recycled from cup to cup.

The overall visual and aural quality of Excite Truck comes in somewhere on the low end of my expectations. Sure, the game runs in widescreen at 480p and has a solid frame rate, but aside from the ok-looking car models, everything about the game is pretty ugly at best. The music is downright atrocious, however, and I could only stomach so many asstastic rock tunes before I lost control and hit the mute button on my amp. It is worth noting that if you own an SD memory card, you can load it up with some of your favorite MP3s and have the game play those in a random order instead -- which proves to be the best option by far.

In terms of the control scheme on offer, I'd have to say that although it takes a little while to get used to the sensitivity of the Wii Remote's steering mechanics, it actually feels good after a while. There are times where you'll crash and lose positions in a race, and there's nothing you can do about it except blame the steering -- it's just a fact of life for Excite Truck. Overall though, Nintendo and Monster Games did a good job of making Excite Truck a novel, if slightly forgettable, racer for the Wii. Like I said at the beginning of the review, I highly doubt Excite Truck will standout in anyone's memory past the end of the year. The lack of decent multiplayer and total lack of online play hurt the longevity, but if you absolutely need a racer to play at launch, you can't really do any better than this one.