Hands on with the final UK build at the Wii House, London.
Developed by Monster Games as the spiritual successor to Excitebike, I had a chance to play Excite Truck ahead of its release in Europe on Friday.
If the name doesn’t give it away, this game involves trucks, or to quote Reggie, “big damn trucks”. It’s an off-road racing game where you tilt the Wii remote to drive your truck through the several courses based on locations worldwide in order to beat the other 5 CPU racers.
It’s not a normal racing game though, far from it. The game has a “stars” system, where you get stars for what you do, and you need to get enough to move on to the next race. You’ll get points for crashes, tree runs, air time or going through mysterious rings floating in the air. So that you don’t just mess around and throw your truck off the nearest cliff in order to get bonus points and forget about driving, you’ll get bonus points for the better position you come in the race. It really makes the game a bit more interesting, and more difficult as you try and get short cuts through trees but without hitting them to get several points for a super tree run. Any game that rewards you for messing up and crashing is good in my book.
That’s not exactly a realistic system, but neither is anything else in the game. What also changes the game is the “real time terrain changing” items, which in normal terms, changes the shape of the track. Generally, a bit of ground will flatten or rise allowing you to make a jump to get ahead of your opponents. It looks cool when it happens, and it doesn’t slow down the pace of the game: though it’s hardly the most important aspect of strategy.
One of my favourite things about Excite truck is the speed. It’s fast, and by that, I mean very fast. The trucks move at a great speed and the game keeps up with it well. Things are zooming past, but not too fast for you to handle.
The speed also helps improve the visuals, which are really nice when in motion. It’s only when you crash and slow down you’ll notice that the trucks seem a bit too shiny and not as detailed as they could be, but when everything is moving fast you hardly notice it at all with everything looking pretty sweet.
The tracks are set around the world in places such as Scotland and Canada, ranging from tracks set in the snow, in grassy areas and on the beach. They are all quite big, with several possible routes for you to take, or in my case, to alternate between when I’m not driving roughly in the right way but not on the paths you’re ‘expected’ to take.
The framerate takes a bit of a hit when there’s snow falling everywhere, but the variety of levels all look different from each other and match what they should look like.
Controlling the trucks works well. You hold the controller horizontally and flat, tilting it to go left and right, holding down 2 to accelerate. Whilst the trucks don’t have much grip, you do feel as if you are always in control of them, finding the perfect balance between too floaty and too stiff controls. Whilst some may say that you can’t get precise enough with tilting the Wii Remote, it works great in Excite Truck and really adds to the game.
You can also press any button on the d-pad to boost, but if you boost too much you’ll end up overheating your truck, which adds quite a bit of strategy to the game, especially when in some areas such as water you can cool the truck down quickly by driving through that.
There’s also a small challenges mode that I briefly dipped in to, with tasks across levels such as driving through the gates. Some of them get quite difficult, and it seems like quite a good thing to increase the length of the game, which was one of my initial worries, though I didn’t play it enough to find out if it is a short game or not.
Multiplayer isn’t as exciting though. I played a few times in multiplayer against James from Wii-UK.net, and one thing struck me throughout: the game seems to slow down in both frame rate and actual speed in this mode. It takes away some of the fun, and to make it worse, it is only two players: with no CPU trucks. Whilst everything about the controls and the strategy stays true, it’s not got the same feeling as the single player mode. Maybe that’s because he beat me each time, but my excuse is that he has played it before. Only afterwards did he tell me that he has clocked up about 6 hours on it…
Excite Truck is certainly a great game though, and one to consider if you’re looking for a new Wii game to play. It’s fast paced and fun, but more of an arcade racer than a normal racing game you’ll get on consoles. The multiplayer is pretty lame, but I’m interested in getting my hands on it again and thrashing through the single player mode a bit more.
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