Excite Truck

If there's one game on Wii's launch list that has had me literally shouting "Wii!", it's Excite Truck. There's something inherently fun about tossing trucks down dynamically morphing mountainsides while pulling off ridiculous jumps and spectacular crashes all at breakneck speed. Excite Truck's design is deliberately arcade - meaning you pick up the Wii remote, hit the dirt roads and get that sense of instant gratification.

The controls are very straight forward. You hold the Wii remote sideways (as if it were an NES controller) with your thumbs on the directional pad and the 1 and 2 buttons. Pressing any direction on the d-pad activates your truck's boost, while the 1 and 2 buttons control your truck's gas and brake, respectively. To steer, you "see-saw" the controller - lifting one end up, and pushing the opposite end down. While catching air, you can rotate the remote forward or back to control the tilt of your truck.

The first time you pick up the game, you'll quickly realize that only subtle steering is needed since the controls are surprisingly sensitive. Once the speed kicks in, it gets more difficult to stay on the track as your subtle movements turn into hugely overcompensated steering sending your truck into tree after tree. It'll take a little practice to keep your steering under control.

Yes, that's a volcano and yes, you're driving towards it.

However, the controls aren't the only novel feature to be found in Excite Truck. Each course has a number of points it expects you to achieve in order for you to progress in the game, so getting first place is no longer your sole objective You get points for successfully pulling off drift maneuvers, catching air, smashing into other trucks, jumping through rings, avoiding obstacles, and even smashing your truck into pieces.

One of the best ways to rack up points is to take advantage of the terrain morphing items scattered on the track. Hit one of these exclamation points, and the road in front of you grows into a huge jump, or plummets into a chasm. One of the most amusing ways to mess with the other trucks on the track is to hit the morph item in time to watch the growing mountain fling the other trucks into the air (yes, you get points for that too). The other item players will find along the track is the POW item. Hit the POW, and your truck gains a super boost of speed and near invincibility - trees that would normally smash your truck now shatter in your path.

Excite Truck does a good job of conveying a sense of extreme speed. When you gain speed boosts by landing properly, or boosting off jumps, the screen gets a very nice speed blur effect around the edges of the screen. It's times like these that will have you hooting like one of the Dukes of Hazzard as you fly off a cliff: with the sun breaking across the horizon while bursts of nitro are blasting out the exhaust and your truck sails through the air almost out of control. It's these types of scenarios, coupled with the intense speed that make Excite Truck exactly that - exciting.


Visually speaking, I find Excite Truck very easy on the eyes. The graphics are very clean and crisp, and the developers have managed to put together some very attractive racing locales. The graphics won't blow anyone away or win any awards, but they are certainly competent.

On the audio front, the sound effects are all average, and the music is nothing special. Luckily the game offers the ability to play your own mp3 music off an SD card loaded into the Wii. This was a feature I didn't really think was all that special until I started plowing through races rocking out with the Bloc Party.

As you can probably tell, I'm having quite a bit of fun with Excite Truck so far. It has a number of novel features and great arcade action that make it stand out from many other typical racers on the market. However, that's not to say that I don't have any concerns about the game. The multiplayer modes (or lack thereof) are disappointing. Multiplayer racing is limited to two players in split screen which makes for a bit of a lonely race - especially without any CPU players. Also due to the arcade nature of the game, the mechanics seem to lack much depth outside of landing jumps well.

Come back for stage 2 where I'll dig a little deeper into the game's mechanics and find out whether Excite Truck has what it takes to keep the party rolling or whether its novelties begin to wear thin after time.