Exciting indeed!
The unique element that Excite Truck really brings to the racing is that, coming in first place does not necessarily mean you win. In order to complete the race with a passing B rating, you will need to collect stars for doing various feats of extreme driving. drifting, high jumps, and even crashing are only a few actions that will earn you stars. Placing 1st through 5th will also give you a large or small star bonus depending on the result. Coming in sixth gives no star bonus.
The only problem with Excite truck is that its feature list is very shallow. There are only a handful of modes and only one major race mode. Along with the standard race mode there is a checkpoint based gate challenge, a high score ring mode, and a arena style crash mode where you try to crash into all other trucks on the map in the best time possible.
There is a second harder difficulty to unlock, but it does not add enough to keep playing. There is also split screen multiplayer for two players. Excite Truck is a great start to what could be a great franchise for Nintendo, If their next effort can bring the same addictive gameplay with a much bigger list of modes and secondary features and maybe even online play, It will be a great success.