Off Road review (Wii)

There's no shortage of racing games for the Wii, and there's some serious competition out there for any new title in the genre. And with the latest in the Ford racing series making its debut on the Wii the big question is does it cut it against the competition? It's closest competitor would be Nintendos own Excitetruck, being another off road racer, which has set the bar pretty high, but can this effort hold its own against such stiff competition?

First Impressions

When delving in to the games career mode first impressions are not great, the only truck you can afford at the start doesn't really show off the game well, and the fact that you have to place first in race events to unlock the next event means you'll have to play the first event more than a couple of times to raise the cash for a better truck. Once you've got access to a decent ride though things are a lot better and you can actually compete at a fairer level against the games AI. Getting the hang of the controls also is another thing that may put people off at first, of course having a crappy truck to start with doesn't help either. You get two methods of control to choose from, the first being the standard motion sensing controls for Wii driving games, if you have one you can use the Wii wheel given away with Mario Kart with these controls. The other control method is that of using the Wiimote sideways as a controller with the D pad for steering, this isn't so good, it's responsive enough, but is just rubbish when it comes to tight corners, you just can't steer as quickly as you can with the motion controls.

Damage Control

Once you have got to grips with the games control system though, and it can take a while, the next big thing to worry about is the damage system. And this can be quite a serious worry, although there is no physical representation of your vehicles damage it does affect performance a fair bit. There are repair pods dotted around the tracks, only two per track though, and they only replenish about 25% of a vehicles damage, which is a little help. But it's all too easy to overlook the games damage system, which I found greatly to my own cost, it doesn't matter if your vehicle vastly overpowers the opposition, if it's a wreck you'll be easily overtaken, even by the games lowliest vehicle. You can fix up your vehicles between events so you can head in to a series of races in top condition, but the other drivers AI can be quite aggressive, so you'll be needing to know exactly where the repair pods are on each track so that you don't take too much damage. Once you've got the hang of the controls and taken the damage system in to consideration then all you have to worry about are the tracks and other vehicles.

Keep on Trucking

You get a decent amount of trucks to play with in the game, a total of sixteen if you can unlock them all, but the problem is the majority of them have some severe shortcomings. The main problem being that there's a lot of trading off between power and control, a lot of the time you'll find yourself with too much of one and not enough of the other. The vehicles themselves are pretty much divided up equally between the unusable and the usable which means that although you do have sixteen vehicles at your disposal only about half are of any real use to you. Considering it's a licensed game and you're driving in real trucks this isn't exactly a good advert for the company endorsing the game. The games tracks suffer another half and half situation as well as the trucks, although there are twenty four tracks in the game half of them use the time honoured tradition of the lazy developer, reversing an existing track. The original tracks themselves are reasonably well designed, and cover a variation of terrains, desert, mountains, riverbeds, seasides and snowy mountains and caverns.

Crappy drivers

If it wasn't for one thing though this would be a half decent racer, especially at its budget price, but one thing makes the game a real challenge, and not in a good way either, and that's the driver AI. There's aggressive driving and then there's just plain unfair, and unfortunately the games AI falls in to the latter category. When they're not barging straight in to you giving you unnecessary damage, they'll knock your tail out forcing you in to a spin, losing you valuable time, and then there's the old favourite, rubber band AI. No matter how well you're doing, you can take first place and hold it for practically the whole race, nine times out of ten you'll find the other trucks catch up with you towards the end of the last lap. It all gets very frustrating, it's not so bad when you're in a two or three race event, as you can still win without placing first in each race, but it really puts the pressure on you and you'll often find yourself restarting races after the games AI pulls one of its dirty tricks on you. There are other event types though which intersperse the race events in career mode, and these are a little fairer on the player, and can also be played in the games arcade mode.

Spice of Life?

You do get quite a few different event modes in the game, but in reality there's not as much variety on offer as there appears to be. Game types expedition and gold rush are essentially the same thing, collect a set number of artefacts or money whilst covering 3 laps of a track, the only real difference is with gold rush you have to compete against other drivers. Time attack is your standard timed race, variations on this are seconds out and checkpoint races where you get extra time for collecting pick ups or passing through gates. Elimination mode has been seen in plenty of other games, just keep ahead of the back of the pack in a race to survive, slalom is another game type that you have to pass through gates in, damage control is a standard race where you have to avoid taking a certain amount of damage. There's not much here you haven't seen in other racing games, but it is a nice bit of variety on just plain racing, and is a little more unforgiving than the standard race events.

Could be better

At the end of the day it's a pretty average racing game here, it has a lot in common with Excitetruck, but is a pale imitation of it really. The games official license adds nothing to the gameplay, and the games graphics and presentation are markedly inferior to Nintendo offering, especially the grating guitar music. It has the advantage of being a budget title though, and if you shop around you can find it with an unofficial Wii wheel for under twenty notes. You could probably pick up Excitetruck second hand and a Wii wheel for not much more though, and I would say it is worth spending the little bit extra for the superior product if you don't already have it.