Excite Truck is a new take on the Excite Bike series of games. In this game, the Wii remote is held similarly to a steering wheel. Tilting left and right steer your truck while tilting forward and backwards angle your truck while in airborne jumps. The 2 button is used for gas and the 1 button for brake. Excite Truck has two means of rating the driver. The first is simply the position in the race. The second involves collecting star points. After a certain number of points are collected, rank increases. These star points are collected by performing various tricks while driving, such as a good jump or a good slide. Even crashes award points, depending on their spectacularity.

No damage is received upon crashing. After a short view of the crash, a crashed vehicle is placed back on the track and players must quickly mash the 2 button in order to get running again. The D-pad is used while airborne to perform a rocket boost. While the controls are intuitive and excellent for allowing anyone to pick up and play the game, control was rather loose overall, which particularly makes me question a non-gamer’s ability to actually play the game much better than a standard racing game.

The graphics in Excite Truck are pretty ugly, and they remind me somewhat of the old Monster Truck Madness games. Two stages were available, a desert stage and an island stage.

I ran into some oddities while playing the game. At one point I managed to have a cactus embedded in the middle of my truck. I kept moving forward and eventually I was able to clear the cactus. Obviously there is some work left to do on collision detection.

While Excite Truck is a decent demonstration of how a racing game can work on Wii, the game itself isn’t particularly exciting due to its sub-par visuals and imperfect control.