Review - Excite Truck

Excite Truck is the successor to the Excitebike series. Now I really liked Excitebike for the old Nintendo NES. But alas, as far as I can tell, aside from overheating, there isn’t too much in common as far as gameplay goes.

This is just a typical racing game, but for some reason I never got comfortable with the controls. Unlike Excitebike, where everything was under control and everything was your own fault, Excite Truck seemed always out of control. Maybe I just suck, or maybe the controls do, I I just didn’t get a connection with this game. I’ve played and enjoyed plenty of other racing games, but Excite truck just doesn’t have anything going for it.

In the game, finishishing isn’t the goal, but collection ’stars’ is. You get stars by performing a variety of tricks, and by placing well in the race. Unfortunately, it seems that the more control you exert, the fewer stars you’ll get. Skidding wildly and out of control, wissing the track and running through trees while constantly over correcting will get you more stars than careful controlled driving. WHile this may sound like fun, what ends up happening is that as you get better at controlling the truck, the number of stars you get goes down. Now maybe, you are suppose to reach some point where you do the wild stunts on purpose and get stars, but I never reached that point. I had to flail about over correcting and running through trees to get my stars. All of this felt very artificial, and I didn’t like doing it. I could never make many stars from jumps (how I think you are supposed to), and besides that, the idea itself just didn’t seem that good to me.

It is fully possible that I didn’t give Excite Truck enough of a chance, but I didn’t feel a desire to give it a chance. Which I feel is the games fault. In any case, there didn’t seem to be anything horribly wrong with it, just nothing right either. All in all, I give excite truck a 6 of 10. It has an average rating of about 72%, so I’m a little under the average, but I don’t really dig racing games anyway. If you are a racing buff, give it a shot, it’ll probably work for you.

Tags: xbox, wii cheats, new wii games, wii fit, metroid prime 3