Saturday, September 8, 2007

Excite Truck




The Excite series moves on to trucks. Excite Truck is a spiritual successor the NES’ Excitebike and the Nintendo 64’s Excitebike 64. The game is a past and hectic racing game that doesn’t care too much about the rules of physics and instead focuses on delivering a swift, action-packed experience.

Excite Truck has a main singleplayer mode, which tasks you with obtaining a certain number of stars per track so that you can move on to the next track. While Excite Truck is a fairly standard racing game you don’t simply have to finish the race in first place, but rather earn as many stars as possible. Thankfully the game is very generous with its star allocation. You earn a lot of stars by drifting and catching air, but you will also earn stars for avoiding (or smashing into) trees or hitting other trucks. Excite Truck also includes a challenge mode which has specific objectives like drive through certain games, smash down x number of things, or go through as many rings as possible.

Excite Truck features the de facto Wii racing game controls. You hold the Wiimote horizontally. The 1 and 2 buttons serve as your gas and brake, respectively, and you steer by tilting the controller. The directional pad serves as a boost button. In the air, tilting the controller will let you lean the truck back so that you can go farther. The controls are fairly but not overly responsive which may or may not have been intentional. Nonetheless, they encourage the game’s exaggerated feel.

Excite Truck does have offline multiplayer support for two-players. As with the singleplayer game, you win by getting more stars than the second player. However, finishing the race in first place does give you points so there is a balance of getting points and doing well in the actual race. It would have been nice to see the game support four-player offline multiplayer or even online multiplayer.

Excite Truck looks good from afar but not so good when the game isn’t in motion. The graphical highlight is the game’s fast framerate and sense of speed, which quite frankly, simply blurs everything out of the way and lets you focus on driving crazily. Upon inspection, though, you’ll notice that the trucks have simple models, that the architecture and geometry is also basic, and that the textures are blurry. Thankfully you wont notice any of these things most of the time.

The game’s audio takes a similar functional yet lackluster approach. The trucks sounds okay and the ambient sounds are also decent but there is nothing in the game that will blow you away. The generic rock and funk soundtrack fits the game’s crazy atmosphere well, though. As a nice bonus, Excite Truck supports custom soundtrack support by loading an SD card with MP3s onto the Wii.

Excite Truck has pretty good gameplay and makes for a great party game. The game’s presentation could definitely be improved, though, and it would have benefited from four-player or online multiplayer. As is, your enjoyment of Excite Truck will depend on how often you want to bust out the game for multiplayer purposes.


Posted by wii-play at 1:58 AM
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