Excite Truck only uses the Wii Remote, so you can put the nunchuk aside for this game. You hold the controller horizontally, with the d-pad on the left and the 1 and 2 buttons on the right, just like you would a NES controller. Slightly tilting the remote left and right will steer your truck and while you’re grabbing big air tilting it forward or back will adjust your truck’s trajectory. The 2 button serves as your gas pedal and the 1 button brakes (you’ll never use it). The d-pad activates your turbo boost, but if you use it too much your engine will overheat. If you laughed at your little sister twisting the controller and leaning while playing games, well guess what, she’s going to get the last laugh. Welcome to the club.

So, the control set up is pretty straight forward, but how does it play? Well, honestly at first I was all over the racetrack, hitting trees, trucks, and everything else thrown at me. If there was an obstacle in my way I was sure to hit it. What I discovered was that the remote is extremely sensitive and it takes really little movements to turn your truck. Initially I was over steering and overcompensating for turns, thus throwing me all over the place. After the slight learning curve wore off, I found myself really digging this game.

The tracks are designed with lots of jumps in mind. In fact, this is where Excite Truck rocks. There are these exclamation points littered about the courses that morph the terrain when you drive through them. What was once a flat road will morph in front of your eyes into a huge hill. Hitting the turbo button right as you leave the top of a hill will give you a turbo jump that will result in some major air. Often times there will be rings that will appear in the air that you can try and fly through earning you star points. You see, simply coming in first in a race won’t guarantee you a victory. Each track has a prerequisite number of stars that need to be earned to consider it “won”. Only after obtaining enough stars on each track will new racing cups become available to play. These stars are earned in a variety of ways. For example, the longer you can stay in the air the more stars you’ll earn. Other ways to earn stars are: drifting, smashing other trucks, driving through trees without hitting them, linking consecutive jumps, and more. You earn bonus stars at the end of the race based on your final placing. Getting first place will net you a bonus of 50 stars, but if you don’t do any of the stunts you won’t earn enough stars to open up new tracks. So, you’ll always want to keep your goal at getting first place, but you’ll also want to mess around as much as possible to net some extra stars. This creates a fine balance during each race so players don’t simply screw around the entire time.

In addition to the morphing terrain, each track is fairly large. In fact, the “driving zone” is quite large. You aren’t confined to a single road and there’s usually plenty of space on each side of the road to go off-roading. There are often multiple paths throughout the course to take and this adds a great deal of exploring to each race. There are also POW icons that will appear. Driving through one of these makes your truck somewhat invincible for a short period of time and you can drive through trees and rivals with no problems. Just don’t try to drive through walls or you’ll not only crash, but you’ll lose your power-up. As I mentioned earlier, the most fun is turbo boosting off of jumps and trying to stay in the air as long as possible. The game really does a fantastic job of tossing you up high so you can see the track down below. It really gives you a good rush when you’re able to pull off consecutive turbo boosts in a row.

Excite Truck is decent in the graphics department. The colors are vibrant and the scenery varies from snow-covered mountains to tropical locations. The trucks look adequate and even have some nice reflections bouncing off of them. If you’re racing on a dirt track the truck becomes dirty and if you’re trailing another truck your view will be hindered by his dust trail. The entire graphical package, complete with sun lens flares and beautiful water, suits the game perfectly. Environment disasters like tornadoes and volcanoes erupting add to the already chaotic racetracks and create memorable experiences. There is some slight pop-in when you boost high into the air. As you return to the track below you’ll notice shrubs and other scenery popping back in suddenly. It’s not a major problem, but it’s noticeable and a bit disappointing to see it in a next-gen (or is it new-gen?) game. The game looks a little better than most GameCube and Xbox games, but nothing close to the 360 or PS3, which is to be expected from the Wii.

The music in the game is mostly just background noise. It’s got some guitar riffs and some rock-style tunes, but nothing noteworthy. Taking a cue from Microsoft’s custom soundtracks, Nintendo has enabled users to bring their own songs into the game. All you have to do is transfer your favorite mp3 songs to an SD card and put the card into the Wii’s memory card slot. From there you go into the sound options menu in Excite Truck and select the song to play. This is an unexpected feature that I hope finds its way into many upcoming games. As most readers know by now, the Wii Remote has a built-in speaker. Excite Truck uses the speaker for sound effects, like when you drive through the exclamation point icons it’ll make the same sound that’s heard through the speakers on the TV. With built-in rumble you’ll feel every bump and collision as well.

Excite Truck is a fun launch game for the Wii. At first I wasn’t enjoying it too much due to the very sensitive controls, but give it a half an hour and I think most gamers will acclimate to the remote very easily. The tracks are fun and there are secret vehicles to unlock to keep people playing. The 2-player versus mode seems like it’s just there to have it. Unfortunately the computer controlled vehicles are not present in the versus mode and there are not any online options, which is a shame since the Wii has built-in Wi-Fi capabilities and this game would have benefited from this option. Still, if you’re looking for more of an “arcadey” racer at launch then you can do no wrong with Excite Truck.