When Exitetruck hit the Wii at launch, many were pleased with the potential but disappointed with the final result. The gameplay had some unique ideas with terrain metamorphosis and the controls somewhat helped to show how a more tactile approach to driving games could give them new life, but the steering was a little rough in the end and the gameplay wasn't engaging enough for many players to see it as a must-buy. Excitebots came out of nowhere, releasing pretty shortly after it was announced, and has become a sleeper hit for the spring season of Wii games. If you haven't given this game a try and have been wanting something new to play on your Wii, this game ought to please plenty of gamers.
From the get-go, Excitebots is very clear about what it's trying to do: be fun, fast, and ridiculous. Players control robots in the forms of animals that shift and change, Transformers-style, as they race around the track. Excitebots' general racing scheme involves steering the Wii remote (preferably within the Wii Wheel, which comes packed in) to control your robot, but what sets it apart from every other racer out there is its microgame approach to racing. You see, getting first place doesn't necessarily mean you win. Final rankings are determined by points awards while racing in the form of Stars. While you're awarded a healthy bonus for coming in the higher-ranked places at the end of a match, throughout the track are littered all kinds of means to collect extra Stars, whether from performing tricks off massive jumps or playing microgames on the fly.
These microgames are rather varied, from swinging around on poles to be launched into the air (by swinging the Wii Wheel rhythmically to build momentum) to boosting into soccer balls or footballs to launch them into goal posts to firing huge darts into giant targets or throwing pies in clown faces or catching butterflies while gliding or jamming on a tambourine or catching a fish...Certainly, the range of activities is entirely random, and it's exhilarating to balance racing with performing these tasks at the same time. It's a truly inventive and refreshing concept which really breathes new life into the racing genre, and it's pulled off very well. Anytime I missed a trick I always felt as if it was due to my own lack of precision or reaction, never a technical fault of the game.
Speaking of precision, the Wii Wheel controls feel extremely solid and smooth -- many players may overcompensate at first, which often happens with this sort of thing, but after an hour or so of playing, most should learn to adjust to the fine-tuned subtleties of steering rather than constantly veering off at extreme angles. What's more is that tilting the controller while airborne will align your bot so you can try to land perfectly and score that classic "excite" boost. There are other times when players will need to rock the controller back and forth to "run" on mechanic legs, or tilt it around to glide in midair. It's generally very smooth and a great example of what the Wii remote can do for the racing genre, though it takes more time to adjust to than it does in Mario Kart Wii.
Excitebots' presentation is on the bland side of things when outside of a race, which is a bit of a shame, but doesn't really matter once you're in the middle of a race. The music can admittedly get a bit repetitive, and many will be upset that music can no longer be read off of an SD card -- but really, if that's how you want to play, just turn down the volume and turn up your music system, as hardly any Wii games can do this in the first place. The graphics look good, with generally realistic environments representing different parts of the world. What I found to be a real treat, however, was the sense of speed and vertigo. There are some cool blur effects when speeding, and there is a real sense of dramatic movement while racing, something that very few racing games actually attain. The recent Sonic games should feel ashamed that they haven't been able to produce this sensation of speed. Furthermore, when launched airborne (generally from terrain that gets transformed mid-race), you can see the entire track below you and get a great sense of vertigo while falling. Suffice it to say that while racing and performing all of these crazy antics to score Stars, you will be treated with an engaging sense of rapid movement to compliment the steering controls.
Excitebots also has an online mode, which can take a little bit of time to start up and get connected, but once it's running, it's very smooth -- I rarely had any difficulties in any of my online play sessions and it was a blast to be playing against a herd of human contenders. You can even bet the Stars you've earned on your skills to earn more -- this is basically the logical way of earning enough Stars to unlock everything in the game, from alternate colors and designs to full-blown extra vehicles, of which there are a decent amount, and they have some nuances in their statistical differences, meaning that picking the right bot for the right job is crucial when aiming for the highest scores and times.
A few disappointments, aside from the mostly bland menu navigation and music variety, lay largely in the track selection: it's pretty decent overall, and there's an extra cup that gets unlocked only on the harder difficulty, but every location is repeated once, leading to some tracks that can feel a bit too similar. Overall, it's not really that big of an issue, and if you're aiming for all S-ranks, the single player campaign, especially with its upgraded difficulty, will leave you with plenty of time to burn your engines out in an attempt to get the high scores. It's also a bit sad that there is only 2-player split screen, but with how much is happening at once and how fast it goes, smaller srceens and more players would have taken a bit cut in the smoothness of the graphics as well as the ability to play the game. Other than these things, I honestly can't come up with much to realistically complain about -- it's a pretty solid package in terms of great gameplay.
