Excite Truck

"Burnout with Trucks. It's a good thing!"

Following the great Excitebike is Excite Truck. Despite the horrible name, this is a pretty good game for the most revolutionary game console so far.

This time round, you have trucks, not bikes. Trucks are more fun, right? Well, that's down to opinion. But the trucks still work well with the game.

One thing that makes this game stand-out from other racers is that coming first isn't the object of the game. Instead, you must collect stars. To get stars, you must do tricks, such as Drift, jump of ramps, smash into other cars, etc. Similar to Burnout. Coming first in the race will earn you bonus stars. Each track has its own star total that you have to beat to complete the race. This isn't as hard as you think, as you can get stars for pretty much anything, and finishing first gets you 50 stars, so if the target is 100, just get 50 and finish first. Not that hard, but the tracks can cause problems.

The tracks are a little short at first, but get longer the further through the game you go. They are well-made, and there are loads of short-cuts on each track to give some surprises out. Each track is littered with loads of trees, and if you hit them, you crash. This can be frustrating if you're new to the controls and are crashing into an inconveniently placed tree every 3 seconds. The roads themselves, if you can call them roads, are not that big, so you will have to, and want to, go off-road, causing problems. You get stars for driving close to trees without hitting them. Burnout again.

The crashes themselves are nowhere near the quality of Burnout's, but if you crash spectacularly, they can still be good enough to make you call out in pleasure. A nice feature is that whenever you crash, you must hammer the '2' button to fill up the bar that appears. Do so, and you get a boost when you start back on the track.

Boosting is here. Pressing and holding the Control Pad makes you boost. Unfortunately, the gauge on the bottom-right shows when you over-heat if you boost too much, slowing your truck down. The gauge goes up too quickly, and falls too slowly. However, driving into a bed of water cools you down, like water should. A neat little trick is boosting in the water. You can boost for ever as you keep cooling down as long as you stay in the water.

Now for the controls. Like virtually every other racing game for the Wii, you hold the Wii-mote horizontally, with the Control Pad on the left and the '1' and '2' button on the right. To steer, you turn the Wii-mote left or right. To accelerate hold '2'. To brake and reverse, '1'. These are all the controls you need. There's one other that's important, though. When jumping, you have to control how you land, by turning the Wii-mote forward and backward to lean forward and backward as you land. Get it just right and land on all 4 wheels and you get a little boost. Always satisfying to get it right.

The trucks themselves are nothing special. There's none of the tampering features like in Gran Turismo. Just choose a truck (you can only choose from 3 at the start), then a colour, then you're off. Simple.

The trucks are drift-prone, but it's actually easier than you might think to steer. It's extremely hard to do a sharp turn, as the trucks can only turn so much. Thankfully, there aren't so many sharp turns. Nice developers.

The tracks are beautiful, with many features. The tracks are split into countries, such as Mexico, Canada, Scotland (my country!!!) and even China. The reason for this is it determines the area the track is set in. One of China's tracks takes place around the Great Wall of China! You can even drive on it!!! Scotland's tracks are foresty places with castles thrown in, Mexico has deserts,Finland has icebergs and Fiji even has islands with a volcano you can set off! On each track is symbols you can drive through. There are 2 kinds. One is the standard power-up, that makes you faster, and nearly-invincible, smashing through trees and other racers. The other changes the layout of the track. Seriously. Driving through one can make ramps form out of the ground, make ramps appear, make shortcuts appear, make rings appear for you to jump through and get stars, and trigger parts of the area, like start rock slides, volcano eruptions and lightening strikes. Nice features that make the beautiful tracks stand out.

There are extra parts to do, like the challenges. There are 3 different types of challenges. Gates, Rings, and Crush. In Gates, you must drive through gates in a track. Miss some and it gets harder, with the time limit and all. Standard challenge. Rings has you launching off ramps through rings. Crush is a special little one. You are put in a wide-open arena. You must ram into the other cars in the area to get stars. This is frustrating, as you are powered-up, so you go far too fast. You nearly always shoot past them, and when you turn around to find them, they've disappeared again. This is a real problem with a section that could've been so much more.

The sound is the usual rock music but you don't have to stick with that. Got an MP3 player? Got a computer? Got a SD Card? Well lucky you. You can put MP3 files onto your SD Card and plug it into the Wii. You can then play your songs while playing the game!!! A real nice touch that every racing game should have.

This is a real nice game that deserves your attention, despite being fiddly early on. A very good 9/10.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/15/07