Review
Played on: Wii
Released: 2006
Confession time; I mostly missed out on the Wii. I played Wii Sports a fair bit and randomly tried some titles, but that's about it. In recent years we've been luckily to have received ports of a few of its big titles; Super Mario Galaxy, review here, and Zelda: Skyward Sword, review here. Excellent experiences which remind me that I missed some great Wii moments.
With that in mind, one Wii launch title back in the day caught my eye in a shop; as you drove along the wide-open tracks, you could alter the ground and create massive jumps with a bonus pickup! I recall briefly trying it, before having to move on and catch a bus.
I liked what I played but never got around to doing anything about it, and I've always wanted to play it properly. The game? Excite Truck, a spiritual sequel reaching all the way back to Excitebike on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Excitebike 64 on the Nintendo 64.
Fast forward to this year and a friend donated his late father's Wii setup to me, which I might come back to in a hardware post later, jumping on the chance I got hold of a copy of Excite Truck. It was time to finally give it a spin!
Let's catch some air and take a closer look!
Structurally, Excite Truck is a nod back to simpler days of arcade racing; there's basically just championship menus, a challenge mode, a versus mode for two players and a tutorial mode. No frills of a story campaign, characters or upgrade system. It may be barebones, but it's a refreshing approach by today's standards; just to-the-point, arcade racing fun!
Considering the unusual control method, and a handful of special tricks you can perform, there's a tutorial mode divided into mini missions which I highly recommend completing before jumping into the main game.
The cars are controlled using only the Wii Remote, leaving the Nunchuck redundant. Steering is done by holding the Wii Remote horizontally and tilting it left and right. Although the manual says you hold the Wii Remote horizontally, I connected it inside one of those plastic, mini-steering wheels and it worked fine!
In addition to just racing for first place, there are a required set of stars for each race in a championship to earn. These are needed for unlocking the next championship. You can take on races in whatever order you wish within a championship and earning stars in done through performing tricks with your car. Be it airtime, drifting, boost jumps, mid-air spins, landing safely and even crashing out opponent cars. The latter feels a bit random with the physics, almost like how Burnout 3's takedowns sometimes just happened without understanding why.
The trickiest part to master is the mid-air 360-degree spin. They're done by flipping the Wii Remote left or right while airborne, but they resort to an odd combination of buttons and require flipping your Wii Remote quickly in one direction, then the other. While it's the best way to earn lots of stars, it takes time to get right, and I wish they’d implemented the motion in a simpler way as you often end up just angling your car back and forth without activating the 360 spin.
Some star tricks earn you extra boost too, like landing on a safe angle or timing your cars boost at the edge of a jump. Giving you a slight edge to get ahead of your relentlessly, rubber banded, competitors. The requirement for number of stars for each race is steep, so you'll have to consistently do tricks to be able get near the number required, simply racing for first place will earn you stars but won't cut it alone.
Furthermore, you can pick up two types of bonus items scattered along each racetrack; one of works as an invincibility mode and boosts the car automatically, allowing you to speed ahead and smash away anything in your way, even trees.
The other, and most common, pickup is the true unique feature of the game; it will alter the whole ground of the racetrack! Suddenly a massive jump appears or a whole mountain sinks into the ground. While it's not exactly the same, it gives me a nod back to Split/Second, review here, which allowed you to alter the racetrack at certain points.
This racetrack deformation is what really makes Excite Truck stand out, giving a dynamic and varied experience for each race, even though the places where the track is altered are the same on each lap. Nevertheless, it's a cool and original feature, looks awesome and makes the experience stand out, even today.
Doing tricks with your car in combination with deforming the racetrack gives way for a vastly different racing experience than what you're perhaps used to. Simply driving fast without doing tricks won’t rack you enough stars for completion. There's a slight SSX vibe here; it's about the trick scores gained and not just the racing.
Although it's an early Wii title the visuals work fine, running on the limited hardware it reminds me visually of racers from the generation before it. It's got that Burnout 3 vibe; blurring the screen immensely when boosting and that bloom-like look, but with strictly off-road environments and cars.
It runs mostly at 60fps and looks sharp enough considering the low 480p resolution, although drops can happen when things get busy in front of your car. It’s a shame this wasn’t ported over to Wii U or the Switch with a higher resolution as it can look genuinely nice on an emulator doing just that!
Worth pointing out; my screenshots are from the GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin. Moderating myself to a 2x resolution boost only, but they make it appear sharper than running this on a large TV on the actual Wii. Your best bet on original hardware is doing so through component cable to allow for 480p, versus the standard 480i, or with a Wii U through a HDMI and again allowing for 480p.
While it’s pre-defined in certain areas, the actual deformation done to the racetracks is neatly animated and a visual trick that makes your jaw drop when massive hills and mountains rise or fall! Definitely a tech that could be reused cool to use in other racers too!
Racetracks are wide and large, allowing freedom for the player to take various routes with lots of raised areas for jumps. You'll need to keep your attention at a high though, because even though the racetracks look massive, the speed you pass through them is insane.
Visually, we're offered Mexican canyons, Scottish woodlands and castles, lush Fiji jungles, frozen and snowy Finnish lakes, Canadian mountain tops and crazy jumps over the great wall of China. It’s a nice set of locations, each with its own recognisable environments and colours. Bonus points for some simple weather and shiny water effects too. The cars themselves have a nice shiny bodywork but are simple in their 3D design, distinctly looking like a PS2/GC/Xbox era title.
Overall, Excite Truck works well as energetic arcade racer focusing on doing tricks, with unique racetrack alteration and massive jumps. While it's fairly forgotten in hindsight, the Wii wasn't the most impressive when it came to racers, it's loved by those who bought it in the early days of the console. There's a simplicity to its structure and what's on offer, but if you're used to old-school arcade racers this should come as no surprise.
It's a tough game, then again arcade racers usually were back in the day. Being precise and training on doing the tricks correctly is the depth of the experience. There's an argument for the gesture controls working against you with their unreliable precision for mid-air spins, but this was the era of Wii waggle controls and what they've made here is the quality of the first party titles versus the more dubious motion controls of the third-party ones.
If you miss pure arcade racers and want a novel and original idea other than just racing for first place, this is a title I can recommend tracking down! Theres a rare Japanese exclusive, and similar, sequel with driving robots; called Excitebots. Excite Truck, on the other hand, is luckily still a fair priced and largely available title to get hold of!
