A good taste of what's to come
The bad: monotonus soundtrack, poor sound effects, SD support not exactly flawless, the game could have been developed more.
I first caught a glimpse of this game at E3. I am a huge fan of old school arcade racers like Sega Rally and Daytona USA so I was automatically intrigued by this title. The one thing excite truck does really well is create a pretty solid arcade style experience. The Wiimote's tilt function is implemented perfectly and you really do get the feeling of being in control of your truck while simultaneously feeling like you'll lose control and crash at any second. The game plays like a dream and the tracks are so cleverly designed that the game's in-your-face, break neck speed style rarely gets tiresome. There are pick up's located around each track that cause the track to deform, making huge jumps and hidden shortcuts appear. This adds an incentive to go back, play the tracks again and find the quickest route. Graphically, Excite Truck is nice looking, but far from perfect. The trucks themselves look rather generic and are lacking in both interesting design and polygons. However, the tracks themselves and the environments all look very nice with highly detailed textures, weather effects and incredible draw distances and everything runs smoothly with no slowdown. It is one of the more impressive looking launch titles. As this is a launch title, there are many symptoms of 'launch title-itus' that are apparent in Excite Truck. From the barebones, powerpoint-esque menu screens to the equally rushed two player only multiplayer, to the unusually weak, midi sounding engine effects, one can tell that this was indeed a rushed game. Speaking of music, you are definately going to buy an SD card and make your own soundtrack for this game. The soundtrack is made up of really generic rock music, with constant loud, trebley guitar solo's that really get on your nerves after a while. So far Excite Truck is the only Wii game to implement SD Card music support, and it is a welcomed feature. However, it is far from perfect. Sometimes, when the race starts the game forgets that I've selected for my customised music to play automatically and plays the normal soundtrack instead. To get my music to play I have to pause the game and go to the SD card menu, which is fine. The annoying thing is it always ends up repeating the song you've selected to play. Even if you select another track, it will play it twice again. The best thing to do is to just hear the first song twice, and then it will start playing the other songs with no repetition. Excite Truck is far from ground breaking, but it is one of the more solid launch titles that perfectly uses the Wiimote and effectively showcases the potential for the racing genre on Nintendo's new system.