Nintendo
Monster Games
Wii
Arcade Racing
1-2
£34.99
Out Now
Excite Truck Wii Review

Exciting or dull as muddy water? We take the monster trucks for a spin in this long awaited follow up to Excitebike.
 
 
  Everybody likes monster trucks don’t they? They're big, exciting and can fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Actually, apart from the odd car crush I’m sure monster trucks hardly ever leave the ground, but Nintendo would have you know otherwise - the game should have been titled 'flying monster truck game', as most of the time you're in control of said vehicles whilst they are gaining massive air from the jumps littered across all the courses, and even if there are no jumps, special icons deform the ground to make them.

The trucks are controlled by turning the remote like a set of handlebars with the 2 button being the accelerator, steering is controlled by tilting the controller; like a steering wheel, the 1 button is used for braking, although you won’t ever be using that one….

The most difficult part of the control scheme is the mapping of the turbo button; as with any of the D-pad’s buttons, the brain takes a little while to realise that pressing left doesn’t make your truck go left but overheats the engine and because your haven’t been steering with the remote you find you hit a lot of trees/walls *(delete as appropriate). But you do eventually get used to it, and it works really well.

Most racing games have you racing the opposition from start to finish, Excite truck follows this simple formula, then chucks it out of the mud splattered window. You see, the objective is to gain a certain amount of ‘Stars’ by performing over the top stunts, and these can range from avoiding lines of trees to jumping through hoops or smashing your rival’s trucks.


Air – you'll be seeing those words a lot in Excite Truck

Nothing in this game is standard, trucks for starters are not normally associated with speed, not so here; the screen actually blurs whilst you are using the turbo, it’s like controlling a truck shaped spaceship hitting warp speed, it’s that fast. Landscapes, whilst taking on different forms, don’t usually tend to re-organise themselves on the fly, but in Excite Truck, with an impressive graphical effect they do in this game, with massive mountains appearing right in front of you, causing some trucks to suddenly flip up in the air out of control.

Some things stay true to form however, races are split up into different cups, with each cup containing five races to get through to gain access to the next cup. An extra difficulty is unlocked by earning ‘S’ grades during every race by collecting stars, this in itself mounts a serious challenge and adds longevity to a relatively short game. The Excite difficulty is once again a real challenge, but worth completing to see the last course, ‘S’ grades are once again required, but without spoiling it, the course is out of this world.

Once the main part of the game is completed, what else is there to see? Sadly not a lot, for such a great racer, the multiplayer is really poor and not very well implemented; this game should have been the first Wi-fi game to play across the airwaves, instead you get a lacklustre two player race, not even four players!! Nintendo must try harder on the inevitable sequel, as this is one area that needs improvement.


The courses are nicely varied, and the graphics are great

Other than the two modes mentioned above the challenges are the last thing to see, and they will keep you occupied for a little while longer. Gate Challenge is a slalom race against the clock type affair and it is good fun trying to beat the best lap times; Ring Challenge sees you racing around the track jumping through as many rings as possible before the timer runs out, whilst gaining points; lastly Crush Challenge sees you trying to ram a group of computer controlled trucks around a rather large course, which causes problems because by the time you actually find the opposition, more often than not you’ve whizzed past them and the timer has run out - it’s a lazy addition to the main game and seems to be an oversight to what is otherwise a well presented game.

So on reflection, I wasn’t expecting this game to be that good, but I was presently surprised by the slickness of the graphics and especially the frame rate, which never seems to drop even when everything is going on, speed blur, eight trucks on screen at once and the land morphing all around you. One thing that is really terrible is the god awful rock covers - why oh why developers are allowed to put this music onto discs is unfathomable, that’s probably why this is the first Wii game to have a custom soundtrack option if you have tunes on your SD card.

This game will last you a long time, contrary to other reviews on the net or in magazines, and although it's easy to begin with, getting ‘S’ grades will take quite a while and certainly will last you more than a weekend like some have said, it’s also not the longest of games but will certainly keep you occupied for a good 20-30 hours, it's just a shame the multiplayer doesn’t add to this.