I remember this game actually being a pretty decent racer with a fair amount of stuff to unlock. I should probably go back to it at some point.
If the world MORPHING around you in real time as you fling your self into ORBIT off mountains while putting your OWN music in this arcade like INSANITY does not sound FUN... come on bro... come on. Do wish local multiplayer went up to four player then just two though.
This game kicks ass. Fun Butt-Rock soundtrack, great sense of speed, good tutorials, it controls well, and all the different ways you can get stars feel super satisfying. Definitely a highlight among the Wii launch lineup.
Low to mid 8/10
Low to mid 8/10
Maybe it's just because there were basically no games to play on the Wii back in the day but "offroad racing game with motion controls" was kind of fun.
One of the best arcade racers you can play. First of all it looks great on Wii. The controls are simple, but not watered down (also worked great with the Wii wheel). The courses are fill with things to do like flying through rings, running through trees or deforming the whole road. The multiplayer was fantastic (sadly no online) and you could use custom soundtrack.
This and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift were the kings of racers of the seventh generation.
This and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift were the kings of racers of the seventh generation.
Very fun, has some very cool ideas like modifying the environment if some stuff gets activated. I also enjoyed how the player could add custom music to the races.
An amazingly well-balanced game. Criminally overlooked, maybe because it's Wii, or only has motion controls? This is a tour de force of close and clever racing; an adrenalin rush like no other once it clicks!
I'm reviewing this for what it is rather than what it isn't. So no deductions for lack of online.
I'm reviewing this for what it is rather than what it isn't. So no deductions for lack of online.
I do not love motion controls, especially when they're the ONLY option. That kind of thing straight up ruined several Wii games that otherwise would have been fine (many of which I owed), such as: Sonic and the Secret Rings, Godzilla Unleashed, Soul Caliber Legends, etc.
BUT, while I may well have likely preferred a traditional control set-up to Excite Truck, and the tilt-y motion only control scheme DOES take some getting used to, once you DO get used to it, this game is honestly a hell of a lot of fun. And as say that as someone who never particularly got into the original Excite Bike.
The game had good graphics for the time, a true sense of speed, and amazing sense of exhileration when you go leaping in to the sky off of a mountain that randomly appears in the track, etc. The jumps are often insane in this, and the game features some really killer tracks. You ONLY get various trucks and jeep-type deals in this, which is a shame, but that's not a huge drawback. AND, in a rare feature for the Wii (or a Nintendo console), if you have an SD card with enough space, you can play your OWN choice of music while playing the game, which only increased the fun, I must say.
I would easily call this the best racer on Wii, in my opinion. The sense of speed, and fun of warping tracks and doing huge jumps and tricks, is unmatched by any other racer I've ever played. It also features a sadly-too-limited, but VERY fun demolition derby type mode, where the ONLY goal is to crash into other cars. I wish more racers had that kind of mode.
On a side note, I was VERY excited by the prospect of a sequel to this. What I was HOPING for, was a game basically called "Excite Race", which would expand the vehicle types, improve the graphics, add more tracks, and add online play. Well, what we got INSTEAD...was this oddity called "Excite Bots", which somehow featured kinda WORSE graphics (at least in art style), had weird transformer animal "bots" instead of cars/trucks, didn't offer enough variety in new tracks, and was semi-ruined by the horrible idea of having little motion-control mini-games happen MID-race. And you HAVE to do them. That killed it for me. It did indeed have (limited) online racing, but that wasn't enough to make me like it, or keep it, unfortunately. A real bummer, because the sequel they SHOULD have made, could have been amazing.
But at least Excite Truck itself is pretty great!
BUT, while I may well have likely preferred a traditional control set-up to Excite Truck, and the tilt-y motion only control scheme DOES take some getting used to, once you DO get used to it, this game is honestly a hell of a lot of fun. And as say that as someone who never particularly got into the original Excite Bike.
The game had good graphics for the time, a true sense of speed, and amazing sense of exhileration when you go leaping in to the sky off of a mountain that randomly appears in the track, etc. The jumps are often insane in this, and the game features some really killer tracks. You ONLY get various trucks and jeep-type deals in this, which is a shame, but that's not a huge drawback. AND, in a rare feature for the Wii (or a Nintendo console), if you have an SD card with enough space, you can play your OWN choice of music while playing the game, which only increased the fun, I must say.
I would easily call this the best racer on Wii, in my opinion. The sense of speed, and fun of warping tracks and doing huge jumps and tricks, is unmatched by any other racer I've ever played. It also features a sadly-too-limited, but VERY fun demolition derby type mode, where the ONLY goal is to crash into other cars. I wish more racers had that kind of mode.
On a side note, I was VERY excited by the prospect of a sequel to this. What I was HOPING for, was a game basically called "Excite Race", which would expand the vehicle types, improve the graphics, add more tracks, and add online play. Well, what we got INSTEAD...was this oddity called "Excite Bots", which somehow featured kinda WORSE graphics (at least in art style), had weird transformer animal "bots" instead of cars/trucks, didn't offer enough variety in new tracks, and was semi-ruined by the horrible idea of having little motion-control mini-games happen MID-race. And you HAVE to do them. That killed it for me. It did indeed have (limited) online racing, but that wasn't enough to make me like it, or keep it, unfortunately. A real bummer, because the sequel they SHOULD have made, could have been amazing.
But at least Excite Truck itself is pretty great!
This game rocks. I initially overlooked it as system launch fodder, but after picking up it a little later into the generation, I realized what an almost transcendent experience it was. What makes it so special? Well, ExciteTruck is actually a stealth-rhythm game in addition to being a really fun arcade "racer." It's fast, it's unique, it's really unlike any game I'd ever played before.
Now, I use quotes around the word racer because winning a race is not the ultimate goal here. Your real goal is to get points, aka stars. How do you get stars? Well, coming in first does help, but doing sick tricks off of terraforming track is where the real challenge lies. What's the best way to help you accumulate those stars? Getting into the zone by listening to your favorite adrenaline-filled tunes. And that's the caveat here; you will need to create your own soundtrack to get the most out of ExciteTruck, because the in-game music just doesn't do the gameplay justice. Thankfully ExciteTruck makes use of the Wii's best but most underutilized feature, custom soundtrack support, so it's built right into the experience.
It's a hard thing to truly put into words, just how much this makes a difference, but trust me on this one: the right music will elevate your driving and absolutely put you in the right frame of mind to enjoy just how fun the monster truck gameplay of ExciteTruck is.
Now, I use quotes around the word racer because winning a race is not the ultimate goal here. Your real goal is to get points, aka stars. How do you get stars? Well, coming in first does help, but doing sick tricks off of terraforming track is where the real challenge lies. What's the best way to help you accumulate those stars? Getting into the zone by listening to your favorite adrenaline-filled tunes. And that's the caveat here; you will need to create your own soundtrack to get the most out of ExciteTruck, because the in-game music just doesn't do the gameplay justice. Thankfully ExciteTruck makes use of the Wii's best but most underutilized feature, custom soundtrack support, so it's built right into the experience.
It's a hard thing to truly put into words, just how much this makes a difference, but trust me on this one: the right music will elevate your driving and absolutely put you in the right frame of mind to enjoy just how fun the monster truck gameplay of ExciteTruck is.
el juego más guay de la historia cuando tenia 6 años
A really good arcade racer for the Wii. Good use of motion controls, and there's even support for custom soundtracks that I kind of wished became a thing with the Wii. Hidden gem.
Using my own music was a really new and cool thing to me at the time and I dug it hard. Game's fun. Not amazing but fun.
Solid, average game. Not much to say about it
The motion controls were actually cool on this one. Felt really high-tech at the time.
this shit fuckin shreds they should make another one for switch
Mid-race powerups that change the landscape are super cool, and I love the concept of rewarding crashes, but the fumbly motion controls and the complete lack of any visual style kind of eliminate any desire for me to play this over any other racing game.
excite is fucking right
For a racing game with motion controls it's pretty fun, but that's Nintendo for you.
this truck really is excite
The first Wii entry of the Excite series, and a really fun game for a launch title. Has all the stunts and ridiculous speeds of Excitebots, but you can only play as different trucks but at amazingly fast speeds across deforming land. The one thing Excite Truck has that Excitebots doesn't is the ability to play whatever music you have on your SD card.
Probably one of my favorite racing games of all time. I like how it kinda mixes typical racing with action and gives great tracks and mechanics. You'd think that the controls would be terrible, which they can be sometimes, but most of the time it is fine. I recommend this if you're a fan of high action and racing games.
Nonsense game.
Just replayed this recently and yeah I wish I didn’t lmao
Most people think of Excite Bike on the NES when they were the word Excite with Nintendo, but a truck series? It intrigued people and had the potential to be as addictive as Excite Bike all those years ago. Being a launch title on the Wii, just like Excite Bike was for NES, it had a lot of hardcore Nintendo fans excited. Insane speeds, jumps, stunts, smashing? Was this Excite Bike evolved for the next generation?
The short answer is no, and the long answer is God, no, but it does have some good merits. While not really resembling anything Excite Bike related, not even a track editor, it has its name and name only. Excite Truck pits generic monster trucks against each other and equally generic tracks turboing and drifting around corners to rack up as many stars as you can. This includes jumping through rings, morphing terrain, and getting invincibility power-ups. Sounds exciting, and it is quite thrilling, but it’s all flash and no substance.
The entire game is controlled with just the Wii remote on its side and you steer by turning the remote. The controls right off the bat are way too sensitive and this is especially noticeable once you are going at mach speeds and on cars that don’t have a high grip rating. I crashed into trees and went off course numerous times, but thankfully if you mash the 2 button fast enough you can hop back on track with a boost. Another underlying issue is the track design isn’t built for these insane speeds. It’s like they finished building the tracks and then decided to make the cars faster. A lot of times I would be a top speed-boosting through jumps only to jump farther than the turn or overshoot things. When you’re going this fast you shouldn’t have to hold back on the boost, it defeats the purpose. I’m not going to strategically manage my boost as most arcade games don’t do this. It feels like they were trying to make the player compensate for their mistake by letting you go too fast.
The speed and squirreliness of the cars lead to missed pick up items such as the terrain morphs (they add a jump in front of your or lower you down to the water to cool your boost meter) or the invincibility pick up are too small to hit when going at insane speeds. It just feels so unbalanced and not playtested enough. I constantly missed these things unless I slowed down to a crawl, and thankfully the AI is brain dead and incredibly easy as even in my worst races I still made first. There’s just too much to do in this game on the track at these speeds. I don’t want to do 360s in the air, I don’t want to morph the terrain. I want well built, memorable tracks with insane jumps and better physics.
This leads me to more problems. The lack of content and just the overall meh feeling of everything. The tracks are some of the most generic I have ever seen. Just random turns and jumps with dirt and trees splattered around. I can’t tell one track from the next, and the visuals are so bad (even for Wii standards) that you won’t care. Awful aliasing and flat textures are just everywhere. Outside of the 25 races in the main event, there are challenging that have you racing through gates or flying through rings. Not very exciting honestly. After the first cup was finished I saw all there was that this game offered and it wasn’t much. This is one of the most generic and plain racers on the Wii and it shouldn’t carry the Excite name at all.
Overall, Excite Truck is a game with an awesome sense of speed, and after about 10 races it all wears off. Horrible track design, generic presentation, lack of content, and just too much speed for tracks not designed for it. I never felt completely in control of a race or my car no matter how good I was at it. A track editor would have been nice to make better ones than the developers provided, and there’s no online play. At best, it’s a filler launch title that I would have been mad to pay $50 for. It’s just like eating a small bag of potato chips. It’s fun during the 10 minutes it takes to eat them then you toss the bag and forget all about it.
The short answer is no, and the long answer is God, no, but it does have some good merits. While not really resembling anything Excite Bike related, not even a track editor, it has its name and name only. Excite Truck pits generic monster trucks against each other and equally generic tracks turboing and drifting around corners to rack up as many stars as you can. This includes jumping through rings, morphing terrain, and getting invincibility power-ups. Sounds exciting, and it is quite thrilling, but it’s all flash and no substance.
The entire game is controlled with just the Wii remote on its side and you steer by turning the remote. The controls right off the bat are way too sensitive and this is especially noticeable once you are going at mach speeds and on cars that don’t have a high grip rating. I crashed into trees and went off course numerous times, but thankfully if you mash the 2 button fast enough you can hop back on track with a boost. Another underlying issue is the track design isn’t built for these insane speeds. It’s like they finished building the tracks and then decided to make the cars faster. A lot of times I would be a top speed-boosting through jumps only to jump farther than the turn or overshoot things. When you’re going this fast you shouldn’t have to hold back on the boost, it defeats the purpose. I’m not going to strategically manage my boost as most arcade games don’t do this. It feels like they were trying to make the player compensate for their mistake by letting you go too fast.
The speed and squirreliness of the cars lead to missed pick up items such as the terrain morphs (they add a jump in front of your or lower you down to the water to cool your boost meter) or the invincibility pick up are too small to hit when going at insane speeds. It just feels so unbalanced and not playtested enough. I constantly missed these things unless I slowed down to a crawl, and thankfully the AI is brain dead and incredibly easy as even in my worst races I still made first. There’s just too much to do in this game on the track at these speeds. I don’t want to do 360s in the air, I don’t want to morph the terrain. I want well built, memorable tracks with insane jumps and better physics.
This leads me to more problems. The lack of content and just the overall meh feeling of everything. The tracks are some of the most generic I have ever seen. Just random turns and jumps with dirt and trees splattered around. I can’t tell one track from the next, and the visuals are so bad (even for Wii standards) that you won’t care. Awful aliasing and flat textures are just everywhere. Outside of the 25 races in the main event, there are challenging that have you racing through gates or flying through rings. Not very exciting honestly. After the first cup was finished I saw all there was that this game offered and it wasn’t much. This is one of the most generic and plain racers on the Wii and it shouldn’t carry the Excite name at all.
Overall, Excite Truck is a game with an awesome sense of speed, and after about 10 races it all wears off. Horrible track design, generic presentation, lack of content, and just too much speed for tracks not designed for it. I never felt completely in control of a race or my car no matter how good I was at it. A track editor would have been nice to make better ones than the developers provided, and there’s no online play. At best, it’s a filler launch title that I would have been mad to pay $50 for. It’s just like eating a small bag of potato chips. It’s fun during the 10 minutes it takes to eat them then you toss the bag and forget all about it.
Excite truck
just as relevant now as it was upon release in 2006. a titan among video games.
Racing games that let you integrate your own music into the game are automatic 4.5 outta 5 ratings for me and I feel no shame in admitting that
Heckuva fun little launch title. It delivers on what it promises… ExciteBike but with trucks and way crazier, in 3D, at high speed, with motion controls. If that sounds appealing, what are you waiting for?
Vroooom
Nice arcade racer with a great track- and truck variety as well as a challenging difficulty curve. If motion controls are your thing, give this one a shot.