How did this happen? How did a sequel to Excite Trucks, which featured exactly the sort of vehicles you’d expect of a Minnesotan racing game, become a game in which metallic anthropods and small critters speed through China and the Himalayas? Are Americans getting weirder? Or did someone from publisher Nintendo wake up from a dream one day, call Monster Games while only half-conscious and scream into the phone, “NO TRUCKS, NO TRUCKS, WE NEED INSECTS ON WHEELS! INSECTS … ON … WHEELS!”
Whatever its genesis, ExciteBots is a terrifically entertaining racing game that adds a wealth of wacky gimmicks to basic mechanics that made Excite Truck such a fun game.
Gameplay: Racing, Swinging and Butterfly Collecting
As in the preceding game, you steer by holding the Wii remote like a steering wheel and use the B Button for a turbo boost. If you boost off of a hill you will fly like a rocket, allowing you to earn points by spinning your vehicle around. Races take place on dirt roads passing through pretty places, speeding over the deserts of Egypt or along winding mountain paths in China.
What distinguishes ExciteBots from its predecessor is the game’s focus on special devices and abilities. For example, tracks are littered with bars you can latch onto and launch off of. You swing around a red bar faster and faster, using the remote to increase your speed, or climb an elevator bar and then thrust your remote forward when you’re pointed in the right direction.
One object will cause your robot to retract its wheels and run; go off a ramp in this state and you will glide through the air collecting butterflies in bubbles and depositing them with a nearby flower.
The Point: Points
ExciteBots is more about gathering points than winning races; winning the race is a way to get points, but you also get them from catching butterflies, doing tricks or performing such actions as knocking a giant soccer ball into a giant net or grabbing a giant dart and hurling it at a target.
For each race you must acquire a set number of points to unlock the next track. However, ExciteBots doesn’t want players to get stuck on a track they can’t beat, so points are added cumulatively: racing poorly many times will conquer a track just as surely as racing it well once.
Points also let players buy new bug-vehicles. Normally I don’t care much about game collectibles, but this game’s bizarre racing cars look so cool that it is worth gathering the points to buy them all.
The Extras are Eh, but the Main Game is a Blast
Besides the basic racing mode, ExciteBots offers a poker race mode, some mini-games and online racing.
In poker racing, you make a poker hand by driving into cards. I don’t understand the appeal; the only variety of poker I enjoy is strip. The mini-games are based on gimmicks from the main game; an entire raise will consist of making soccer goals or crashing into bowling pins. I found playing one gimmick over and over boring, but I do like the mini-game that simply strings together all the sports mini-games in random order.
While the poker racing and mini-game collection underwhelmed me, the nice thing about ExciteBots is that it offers so much that the stuff you don’t care about gets lost amidst all the fun features.
Online racing works well, using the same basic system seen in Mario Kart Wii. It’s very simple and straightforward, leaving me nothing interesting to say about it.
The reader might by now be wondering why mechanized bugs would be used for races, but that’s a question ExciteBots never considers. While many games attempt to create a context for their weird ideas, ExciteBots doesn’t bother, and I am pleased the game doesn’t inflict weird sci-fi cut scenes on players to explain the premise. Like a dream, it is up to you to decide what, if anything it all means. And I’ve decided it means those Minnesotans really know how to dream.
Dream on Minnesota.
