At the Wii’s release we got a  game that was supposed to be the spiritual successor to the NES original Excitebike. ExciteTruck ended up not being very good. Now we’ve got a spiritual successor to that, but… Well, look at the cover art, it looks ridiculous. But I still thought that after the less than stellar ExciteTruck they might’ve modified the engine and made something a bit more proper.

So let’s take a look and see if they managed to make something that was any good, or if the game is as ridiculous as the cover art (seriously, you can’t look at the cover art and think “Hey, this looks like a good game”).

Read on!

Looks and Sounds

Let’s start with the vehicles. They’re all based on an animal. They do fine in looking like the animal they’re supposed to represent, and the option to, but otherwise… They look really lame. They look bland and lifeless, and their animations are completely unnatural. They don’t look like they’re rolling on the ground, they just seem like they’re… sliding just a bit above it. And their walking animations are ridiculous, it’s like they were planning on making them look stupid. The concept for the racers is fine, but making them look like more than just lifeless objects would’ve been nice.
The environments are bland and boring. The track design is very boring, with all tracks looking incredibly similar or having very similar paths to take. There’s a few courses with some different things to do, but it’s basically a bunch of jumps with not much more. And the visuals are… Well, it’s hard to tell the difference between each level, unless it’s a desert or snow course. The tracks are based on various areas in the world. Canada, Finland, Fiji Islands, and various other places. And still they all look the same, other than some varying vegetation(or previously mentioned desert/snow stages).

Overall, the game looks, well, bland. They’re nothing visually interesting. I will be honest though and say that the sense of speed is nice and there’s no lag at all, no matter how fast things are going and what’s going on in the game.

The music is very bad. The only okay music is the one when selecting tracks and vehicles. The rest is… annoying at best. Some of it barely sounds like music, and it sounds like a 5-year old designed the soundtrack. The sounds themselves are… okay I guess. Nothing special, and nothing unexpected.

Gameplay
Controls
The controls are basically the same as in ExciteTruck. You hold the Wiimote sideways and steer by turning the Wiimote. The 2 button accelerates, the 1 button brakes/goes on reverse, the up and down arrow make you use Turbo, and the A button uses items. Very simple and easy to pick up… or so you’d think.

The steering is pathetic at best. It’s easy to oversteer, and hard to be precise with where you want to go. It takes a lot of practice to actually get used to it. And even then it’s easy to screw up. That’s because the game feels incredibly slippery. It’s like the wheels on the vehicle get no traction from rolling on the ground at all, and they just go all over the place. Basic steering in this game just doesn’t work as well as it should, and that alone makes the game… not very enjoyable.

There’s other elements to control too. There’s various context-sensitive moments in the game. Most of those come from bars. They only require getting close to them, and it starts you up on the animation, spinning you around them. Some require to “push” the wiimote at the right time, and the main one (red bars) require you to spin your wiimote at the right rhythm to do 10 rotations on it to send yourself flying. When in the air, you can steer your vehicle a bit and adjust your angle, and by holding 1 and a turbo button, you can spin. And when you crash, you need to shake the Wiimote to get back up.

That’s really all there is to the controls. Proper use of the Wiimote, that’s for sure(it’s used properly and it’s not “just” “gimmicky”), but the crappy steering make the whole thing a very frustrating experience. The other controls are fine, but the steering just ruins everything.

Main reason the game sucks (other than the controls)
So it’s a racing game. Your goal is to get to the goal first… right? Actually, no. Your goal is to get enough stars, and the only thing finishing first does is give you more stars. For each race you are ranked depending on the number of stars you get, and to get to the next cup you need to get at least B on each track in the current cup.  Why does this system, as a whole, suck? Well, because, even if you suck at the game, you can still S-rank every race. That’s right. It’s not impossible to finish in last place and still get an S-rank (happened to me a few times). I was relatively bad at the game (at first, eventually managed to control the thing a bit better), and I still managed to finish in first place most of the time, and when I didn’t I still got either S or A rank anyways.

So what gives stars? Well… just about everything short of accelerating or using the turbo. You get stars for “drifting”, being in the air, spinning in the air, crashing, releasing from bars, recovering from bad bar releases, touching other racers, getting other racers getting thrown in the air, making sandwiches, hitting bowling pins, doing a field goal, hitting the soccer ball in the net, throwing a dart at the dart board, doing backflips, playing the tambourine, driving close to trees, fishing, throwing pie at clowns and other random things. There’s so many things giving you stars it’s almost impossible not to get enough for at least a B-rank.

Granted, there’s a harder mode, where basically the only change is the number of stars you have to get, but once you’re done with the normal mode, getting through “Super Excite” mode is gonna be a piece of cake.

Everything else
So the game itself. Well while on your way to the finish line, other than struggling with the lame steering controls, you’ll find multiple obstacles… mainly holes and trees. Strewn across the courses are gold boxes. Touching them makes something change ahead of you. Mountains might pop up, bars might appear or be revealed, a tube with sandwich ingredients floating around might appear, a soccer ball might appear close to the goal, a football ball might appear close to the… field goal thingy, a present with some contextual object to use (like darts to throw on dart boards or pies to throw at a clown) might appear and items that you can use either against other players (bombs, teeth, hammers) or to boost yourself (fireworks) or to…. just do noise (tambourines) might also appear. Those gold boxes are really important, but are also completely non-random. So when you know that one gold box makes a mountain appear, it’s gonna do the exact same thing each time you touch it.

There are multiple types of bars. Elevator bars make you go higher and give you a slight speed boosts, yellow bars give you bit of air time and a slight speed boost and vertical bars give a big speed boost and occasionally brings you towards altenate routes. Those bars all require to “push” the Wiimote at the right time. There’s also a backflip bar, which, after holding on to, you’ll get propelled vertically and will have to do backflips to collect stars. The most “important” bar is the red bar. These require to spin around a few times and you’ll get launched at high speed (depending on how youll you timed your wiimote spins) and you’ll usually have plenty of time to air spin. What’s annoying is that if you miss the red bar you crash for sure, and sometimes it glitches and just makes you crash even if you’re more than close enough to hang on to it.

Crashing is a major annoyance. It can get you to start back a whole section, and for some of them (that one part with a golem requiring a precision jump to get to one of two corridors was a bit troublesome) it’s hard NOT to crash.  But this is basically all glitched up because the game seems unsure WHERE to put you on the track after you crashed. Sometimes it puts you a few hundred meters back, sometimes it brings you to the other side of an obstacle completely. It’s either glitched or totally random.

The turbo mechanic is actually one of the interesting parts of the game. Here, you can turbo anytime. The meter on the bottom-right shows how close you are from overheating. So as long as you don’t fill that meter up, you can turbo how you like and let go to cool down a bit. Water also serves as auto-cool down fluid or something, and even “cures” you from overheating. But then the game comes and makes the turbo mechanics… not so great. Why? Because landing right, as long as you get 1 star for your air time, gives you a speed boost equivalent to using the turbo, and it doesn’t touch the turbo meter at all. A bit cheap, huh?
Turbo also serves to make you do “Turbo jumps”, which require to use the turbo and do… something… when you launch from a jump. This gives extra air time and lets you spin more and sometimes use things that appear higher in the air.

Overall
This isn’t a very good game. Not very challenging, not very fun, it looks like ass and sounds just about the same and the game is filled with glitches. To make it even more lame, the controls suck (which is sad because this uses the Wiimote relatively well), steering is a hassle and the “wide variety of things to do” just makes every badly-designed course more repetitive and boring. And I guess I forgot to mention that just about every vehicle sucks and there’s not much reason to use anything other than the Bat (unless you really prefer using heavy vehicles, then that’s understandable)…

There are some well done things. The turbo system is interesting, the sense of speed is relatively good, and (if you have REALLY low standards and end up liking the game) there’s lots of things to collect and the online modes(and various modes of play) adds extra replay value.

But really, I can’t suggest this game to anyone. The Wii already has Mario Kart which is a million times better (and it doesn’t feel like a half-assed attempt at a game), so why would anyone want to go with something so plainly inferior? Just play a few races in Mario Kart and you’ll get a lot more enjoyment from that then you’ll get with ExciteBots.

jobocan Console, Games, Review, wii