For Wii’s November 2006 launch, Monster Games, developers of three decent NASCAR games and Test Drive: Eve of Destruction, decided to take on the Excite series and put it in a new direction, using trucks instead of motorcycles. The result is half-minded fun and feels like the N64 Cruis’n games with some Excitebike touches.

Excite Truck’s gameplay consists of boosting as much as possible without overheating, performing super truck smash(!)es, drifting around corners for a quarter mile, and flying through the air for nearly ten seconds at a time. It’s not deep gameplay, but it’s extremely fun and addictive. Scattered around the game’s tracks are floating exclamation marks, which, when touched, deform the terrain in front of you. This can do anything from simply raising or lowering the track to make jumps to causing an oil tanker to crash into an iceberg that you have to jump over. It fails as a throwback to the track editor in Excitebike, but that doesn’t stop it from being really fun to watch and race on.

The second of the Excitebike touches come from the motion sensing controls, where you rotate the Wii remote while flying through the air, trying to make your truck parallel to the ground. If you succeed, just like in both Excitebike games, you’ll get a boost of speed as soon as you land. This kind of control would be impossible to the same extent on a traditional pad. Twisting the remote to steer your truck works great once you get used to it (most people do during their first race), but I’m not convinced that it works any better than just using an analogue stick would. These controls don’t feel at all bad, and certainly make it feel like a Wii game, but, at least for steering, it’s not an improvement.

Worth mentioning, if only briefly, is not only the painful, cheesy 90s electric guitar music, but the custom soundtrack support via SD card.

Excite Truck was clearly rushed out the door to release alongside the Wii, as the multiplayer is fun, but is rather featureless as the only option is to race against a single friend in split-screen with no AI racers. The single player is equally short-winded, as after you beat the first set of tracks, you race the same ones with faster trucks, then when you beat that you do the same ones mirrored. You can spend a pretty decent amount of time with the game if you’re set on unlocking every mode and truck, but the majority of players wont be motivated.

Excite Truck is the adrenaline rush it should be. It’s a game about excitement and trucks, and nothing else. If those two things interest you in the slightest this is a game worth adding to your collection, otherwise it’s an easy skip.