Excite Truck preview: all about controls

Given that Excite Truck is a racing game, you guys would probably want to know more about how fast you can actually speed down lanes. We can’t tell you exactly how fast (are we talking mph here?) but what we can tell you though is how the Wiimote will enhance the good old racing genre via the Excite Truck experience.

After you get past the absurd title for the game (shouldn’t it at least be ExciteD Truck? Or maybe that’s just us?), you’ll soon realize that it brings back a lot of childhood memories with its bicycle counterpart Excite Bike. But before we start going down memory lane and drift off to Nostalgia County, let’s get back on track (pun intended) with Excite Truck and its controls.

First off, to play the game, you’ll use the Wiimote turned on its side and held horizontally, like your conventional controller. The 1 and 2 buttons function as your brakes and accelerator (respectively) while you just let your left thumb sit on the D-pad.

Read on for more mad driving details!

Pre-Order: [Excite Truck]

Given that Excite Truck is a racing game, you guys would probably want to know more about how fast you can actually speed down lanes. We can’t tell you exactly how fast (are we talking mph here?) but what we can tell you though is how the Wiimote will enhance the good old racing genre via the Excite Truck experience.

After you get past the absurd title for the game (shouldn’t it at least be ExciteD Truck? Or maybe that’s just us?), you’ll soon realize that it brings back a lot of childhood memories with its bicycle counterpart Excite Bike. But before we start going down memory lane and drift off to Nostalgia County, let’s get back on track (pun intended) with Excite Truck and its controls.

First off, to play the game, you’ll use the Wiimote turned on its side and held horizontally, like your conventional controller. The 1 and 2 buttons function as your brakes and accelerator (respectively) while you just let your left thumb sit on the D-pad.

Now, instead of using the D-pad (which, by the way, activates your boost for jumps, etc.) to steer, all you have to do is tilt the Wiimote left and right like a steering wheel. A bit of caution in steering: the Wiimote is unbelievably sensitive. Swinging it left and right, as you would a steering wheel, will only make you slam into walls. Sadly, there are no customizable sensitivity settings, which would have made steering easier.

The game features extreme courses set in Mexico, Fiji, Scotland and Canada, that are loaded with ramps to skyrocket you into the air. And that’s all good, but if you wanna go crazy and jump higher, simply twist the controller towards you, and this yanks the front of the truck upwards. And when we say high jumps, we mean HIGH. As in high enough to clear huge stretches of forestry and reviving your megalomaniac tendencies that you’ve actually defied gravity.

While airborne, simply tilt the remote backwards and forwards to align your wheels with the ground below. Perfect landings earn you free boosts, which will automatically send your truck rocketing forward. This is basically what the game is all about: jumps, boosts, crashes, and landings — all of which will earn you stars, which in turn determine who will be crowned as the winner. You earn stars for winning races (50 for the winner, 25 for second place and so on), but most of the stars you really get to snag by driving like mad. And with the two-player mode in check, it’s a guaranteed one helluva chaotic ride from start to end.

And to make the game even crazier, there are large icons dotted around the courses which, when collected, will trigger changes in the terrain you’re on. So even while racing, you’ll see the ground morph into hills or quarries that you have to zip through. And these changes get even more outrageous with more extreme icons you collect: erupting volcanoes, spitting rocks, giant tornadoes, you name it. You’d want to pay attention to these icons because grabbing them can also be used to hinder your enemies’ progress.

Reggie was right when he said during E3 that Excite Truck will put you behind the wheel of a “big damn truck” ‘coz really, we couldn’t have put it any other way. With the jumps and crashes, it’ll really test how chaotic you can get with just a four-wheeled big damn truck in your arsenal. The controls may need a little getting used to but once you get the hang of it, everything’s all good. Perhaps a sensitivity setting?

We’ll keep you posted for more Excite Truck updates before they give you control of the wheel on December 8.

Pre-Order: [Excite Truck]

Via CVG