This game should have everything you could want from an off-road racing title, but somehow it manages to crash and burn.
Good:
-The game did have a well-designed interface and plenty of vehicle / rider options and game modes.
-The graphics looked nice on the Wii as well. The vehicles themselves sounded real enough too.
-The controls are easy to pick up and learn, they work well for the Wii. Also the game doesn't rely heavily on the motion-controls. There is just flick the remote for jumps; then left , right, up, and down for tricks.
Bad:
-However there are a lot of flaws. The controls are so sensitive that it is a struggle to keep your ATV much less your dirt bike on a straight path. Imagine moving your control stick with a 5 lb thumb. Remember how Excite Truck felt for the first 5 minutes? Yeah, it's kinda like that.
-I never got online play to work, I could log in but I was never able to connect to a game.
-The worst part of the game was the sound. Here is a title that uses real songs to make up it's music library (a sign of developer laziness in my opinion). You get 20-some songs from metal, alternative, punk rock, and a couple rap artists... you know, stuff that your average college-going rebellious young male would have on his iPod. This is not how games should sound, not only is the selection below mediocre, but you listen to the same songs over and over again after a period of extended play. You can't listen to anything except the game's pre-given playlist, but you can turn the songs off and choose to be left with no background music WHATSOEVER. You can't even play songs stored on your Wii SD memory card. What's up with that? I have never played a game with this horrible of audio options. The lack of good game music just drains your soul.
-Finally is the gameplay, in a short sense: it's boring. Races start with a trial run of the course for 5 laps (optional), part one of the race for 5 laps, and the last race for 5 laps. That may not sound so bad, but it gets really old really fast when you run the same course for 10-15 laps over the course of 20 minutes. Plus it's insanely easy. I often crashed time and time again, being bumped back down to last place, and within the same lap I managed to get back up into first place.
Final Thoughts:
Overall I was disappointed. I don't believe I got a total of more than an hour of gameplay time down for this title; but then again that has been happening a lot to me lately, probably because I've been playing CRAP. If you must buy an ATV / MX type game, I guess this will do for you. For me, the whole experience was comparable to playing Excite Truck with a pencil jammed up my wiener-hole while having leeches suck the blood from my inner ear. I give it a 6, so consider yourself lucky THQ. Next time you mess up I won't be so merciful.