Excite Truck

 

    People that buy a console at launch, I've noticed, have a tendency to also buy “tide-me-over” games. What I mean by that is, there might be a game that they're anticipating down the line, but since it isn't out yet, they buy a similar enough game to the one they're waiting for to kill some time. I imagine while Wii owners were waiting for the system's Mario Kart game to come out, they picked up Excite Truck in the meantime. As the name implies, the game is part of the Excite series, which traces back all the way to Excitebike on the NES. Despite being an official Nintendo racing series, it never gained quite the same fan base as Mario Kart or even F-Zero, mostly because of its presentation being a fair bit dry compared to the instant recognizability of Mario Kart or the sci-fi cool of F-Zero. With this game, however, there is definitely an active attempt to give it more of its own identity.
    Start the game up and you're greeted with a mandatory tutorial, although one I'm actually pretty thankful for, as the game does function pretty differently compared to your typical racing game. Excite Truck, at its core, is all about the stunts. Pretty much every special action or motion does a different type of trick, and there's tons to do within the tracks to make your driving look more stylish. Everything from going through rings, narrowly grazing past trees, turbo-boosting off of ramps and even crashing your truck in a cool way will earn you points. It's such an integral part of the game that it's not only encouraged, but required; getting in first place may still be a part of each race, but it won't count as a win if you didn't do some cool stuff to reach that point. The unorthodox scoring system is more in line with a skating game or even a spectacle fighter, making it so the goal becomes stringing combos of stunts together as smoothly as possible.
    Of course, what holds it all together is the trucks feeling pretty good to control. It uses what would become the standard for Wii racing games, holding the Wii Remote on its side and using it akin to a steering wheel. The trucks have the right amount of traction to them, with none of the steering feeling oversensitive or anything like that, and the wheels of the trucks will even account for how much you tilt the Wii Remote forward or back, to give you a boost if you land parallel to the ground. The only part of the controls I found problematic were the air spins, where you have to hold the 1 button down and swing it back and forth to spin, but I could never quite get it to work consistently. That's the only major issue, though, as the feel of the game is pretty much on point for what it's going for.
    That being said, even with its unique gameplay, it doesn't really add much on the visual or sound end to match. It is very much still just a truck game in that regard, none of said trucks having much in the way of visual flair and the tracks mostly being straightforward off-road ventures. The track selection may list real-world countries as their basis, but the theming doesn't go beyond “this is the snow level” or “this is the desert level”. There are icons you can hit that terraform the levels in real-time to make them easier to trick off of, but the effect loses its wow factor after the first couple times. The meh presentation extends to the sound too; while the sound of the trucks has that important crunch to it, the music is pretty lackluster, consisting of completely forgettable instrumental hard rock tracks. It does at least let you load custom MP3s from your SD card, which is a nice feature.
    All in all, though, what holds it back in the long run is that, being a launch title, there's not a lot to do and it gets somewhat repetitive. The game has four cups of increasing difficulty, with one unlockable extra-hard track at the end, so most of your time will be spent completing those to make all the tracks available for multiplayer. There is a challenge mode, but it's nothing to write home about; go through gates, go through rings, smash other cars, and that's about it with only six challenge maps to speak of. You could go for S-ranks or the game's built-in achievements if you really want, but by that point your patience with the generic guitar riffs will start wearing thinner than the amount of content the game has.
    There is something there, though, I feel. Even with its bland style and sparse amount of stuff to do, the utterly unique stunt system is enough to make it engaging for as long as it lasts. It's the kind of game where, if renting games were still a thing, it would perfectly fit that specific need and have just enough entertainment to fill a weekend. I hear ExciteBots, this game's sequel, does address a lot of what I complained about with this game, and I will get to it eventually. For this, though, it's a good enough racing game with a very well-realized, unique idea at its core, and if you're willing to learn its mechanics, I'd say it's definitely worth giving a try, at the very least.