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IGN Review of Nitrobike
As far as racing goes on Wii, there's still no better option out there that trumps Nintendo's own Excite Truck. Releasing during launch, Nintedo's ode to arcade racing blended insane physics with tons of speed, and aside from the lack of online and fleshed out multiplayer, we've still seen no better on Wii. With Nitrobike, Ubisoft is attempting to take its first step towards the 2008 resolution of "Nintendo-like quality" by offering Wii owners another racing package, this time complete with six player online support, four player splitscreen, and more overall depth.
And in some ways, Nitrobike is a success. The game's sense of speed is pretty impressive, the trick system is larger than most arcade racers out there (especially anything on Nintendo's system), and the progressive level design starts out simple, but adds serious layers of depth and overall scope as you progress through the 60+ challenges and 20 levels. It isn't a better final product than Excite Truck, but it comes pretty close in some key areas.
As with nearly every other racer on the system, Nitrobike goes with standard tilt control for racing. You'll hold the Wii-mote in its classic NES position, tilting it left and right to steer, while using the d-pad for boost and tricking. Gas and brake are assigned to the 2 and 1 buttons respectively; pretty straightforward. As with games like Burnout or the aforementioned Excite Truck, Nitrobike is focused largely on boost, and successfully pulling off mid-air tricks allow for another four additional notches in your overall boost bar. The more you trick, the longer you can boost.
Rather than going with an overly-simple design, however, Left Field Productions (known best for Excite Bike 64) embraces a more technical feel with Nitrobike, so you'll need to know when to boost, when to lay off, and exactly how to take the varying types of turns and bends. Veterans of Excite Truck know both the freedom and somewhat forgiving feeling of the more wide open world that Nintendo created, but in Nitrobike you've often got just one path to take, and you need to nail it to stay in the lead. It certainly does give the game a more closed off feeling, as you lose the free-flying feeling you get from boosting over a group of challengers from 500 feet in the air, but when you boost full speed into a hairpin turn, double-tap gas to force your back tire to slip around into position, and then boost off in a new direction with ease you'll see exactly where Nitrobike's focus went. It's fast, it's frantic, but it's also grounded a bit more in reality than its direct competition.
Moving away from the actual design choices though, Nitrobike is still a less polished competitor than what Nintendo offered at launch. While tilt control has a relatively high learning curve in this game – something we enjoy – it's met with some technical deficiencies as well. The mid-air tilt control, used to position your bike for smooth landings, is extremely floaty and a bit unresponsive. We'd expect most players to actually ignore it for the majority of the time, as there's no reward for a "perfect" landing in Nitrobike, and you ultimately don't have quite as much control as you'd want when soaring through the sky. The game's final version still has some frame issues as well, so when you get a whole line of racers bunched up in a specific spot, you'll see some pretty staggering slowdown for a second or so while the game catches up.
The overall in-race presentation is extremely basic as well, mixing everything from sketchy AI racers to some seriously lacking visuals. Nitrobike goes for a more realistic design, but the end result is a muddy, dulled graphical showcase. Whereas other Wii titles have brightened up the color, went easy on the actual poly count, and put more emphasis on crisp visuals over actual realism, Nitrobike ends up looking more like a high-poly evolution of N64 or PSX racers, where the sheer amount and complexity of in-game objects is lost in the end. Sometimes less is more, and we'd take polish over unnecessary grit any day. This feeling is carried over again into things like camera movements for tricks, destruction animations when racers collide with in-level objects, and generally low-frame animations for fire effects and explosions.
And while some of the track designs and race types are entertaining to tour, we never shook the nagging feeling that Nitrobike is missing soul. Much like the first iterations of the Burnout franchise, Nitrobike is totally generic, and doesn't even attempt to create an actual world for players to enter. The character designs are as simple and generic as it gets (they actually feel like less inspired versions of Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, if that's even possible), and while the bike concepts are neat, the final models are extremely simple, both in texture and model. It's obvious Left Field put an emphasis on gameplay, and now that it's more or less locked down, it's time to give this franchise some actual attitude, rather than just making assets to quickly throw into an engine.
On the multiplayer front Nitrobike offers some decent local play, but online is sadly a mystery. We held off on our final review for a chance to get online with the game, but at the time of publish it wasn't possible. As for the online options, Nitrobike allows both race and elimination modes online, with up to six people at a time. Part of the reason we couldn't find online competition, however, lies within the game's online structure, which requires you to either enter in a friend code, or select not only what game type you want to play, but also how many players. There's head-to-head, four player, and six player, but since each is a specific "game search" (along with both modes) it's very difficult to find a matching racer. There's no lobby to stop in at and meet up with racers, and no way to do a simple "quick match" that links you with as many racers as possible automatically, so if you plan on playing this one online, your best bet will be to hit up message boards and start trading friend codes; not the most intuitive online system.
©2008-01-23, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
And in some ways, Nitrobike is a success. The game's sense of speed is pretty impressive, the trick system is larger than most arcade racers out there (especially anything on Nintendo's system), and the progressive level design starts out simple, but adds serious layers of depth and overall scope as you progress through the 60+ challenges and 20 levels. It isn't a better final product than Excite Truck, but it comes pretty close in some key areas.
As with nearly every other racer on the system, Nitrobike goes with standard tilt control for racing. You'll hold the Wii-mote in its classic NES position, tilting it left and right to steer, while using the d-pad for boost and tricking. Gas and brake are assigned to the 2 and 1 buttons respectively; pretty straightforward. As with games like Burnout or the aforementioned Excite Truck, Nitrobike is focused largely on boost, and successfully pulling off mid-air tricks allow for another four additional notches in your overall boost bar. The more you trick, the longer you can boost.
Rather than going with an overly-simple design, however, Left Field Productions (known best for Excite Bike 64) embraces a more technical feel with Nitrobike, so you'll need to know when to boost, when to lay off, and exactly how to take the varying types of turns and bends. Veterans of Excite Truck know both the freedom and somewhat forgiving feeling of the more wide open world that Nintendo created, but in Nitrobike you've often got just one path to take, and you need to nail it to stay in the lead. It certainly does give the game a more closed off feeling, as you lose the free-flying feeling you get from boosting over a group of challengers from 500 feet in the air, but when you boost full speed into a hairpin turn, double-tap gas to force your back tire to slip around into position, and then boost off in a new direction with ease you'll see exactly where Nitrobike's focus went. It's fast, it's frantic, but it's also grounded a bit more in reality than its direct competition.
Moving away from the actual design choices though, Nitrobike is still a less polished competitor than what Nintendo offered at launch. While tilt control has a relatively high learning curve in this game – something we enjoy – it's met with some technical deficiencies as well. The mid-air tilt control, used to position your bike for smooth landings, is extremely floaty and a bit unresponsive. We'd expect most players to actually ignore it for the majority of the time, as there's no reward for a "perfect" landing in Nitrobike, and you ultimately don't have quite as much control as you'd want when soaring through the sky. The game's final version still has some frame issues as well, so when you get a whole line of racers bunched up in a specific spot, you'll see some pretty staggering slowdown for a second or so while the game catches up.
The overall in-race presentation is extremely basic as well, mixing everything from sketchy AI racers to some seriously lacking visuals. Nitrobike goes for a more realistic design, but the end result is a muddy, dulled graphical showcase. Whereas other Wii titles have brightened up the color, went easy on the actual poly count, and put more emphasis on crisp visuals over actual realism, Nitrobike ends up looking more like a high-poly evolution of N64 or PSX racers, where the sheer amount and complexity of in-game objects is lost in the end. Sometimes less is more, and we'd take polish over unnecessary grit any day. This feeling is carried over again into things like camera movements for tricks, destruction animations when racers collide with in-level objects, and generally low-frame animations for fire effects and explosions.
And while some of the track designs and race types are entertaining to tour, we never shook the nagging feeling that Nitrobike is missing soul. Much like the first iterations of the Burnout franchise, Nitrobike is totally generic, and doesn't even attempt to create an actual world for players to enter. The character designs are as simple and generic as it gets (they actually feel like less inspired versions of Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, if that's even possible), and while the bike concepts are neat, the final models are extremely simple, both in texture and model. It's obvious Left Field put an emphasis on gameplay, and now that it's more or less locked down, it's time to give this franchise some actual attitude, rather than just making assets to quickly throw into an engine.
On the multiplayer front Nitrobike offers some decent local play, but online is sadly a mystery. We held off on our final review for a chance to get online with the game, but at the time of publish it wasn't possible. As for the online options, Nitrobike allows both race and elimination modes online, with up to six people at a time. Part of the reason we couldn't find online competition, however, lies within the game's online structure, which requires you to either enter in a friend code, or select not only what game type you want to play, but also how many players. There's head-to-head, four player, and six player, but since each is a specific "game search" (along with both modes) it's very difficult to find a matching racer. There's no lobby to stop in at and meet up with racers, and no way to do a simple "quick match" that links you with as many racers as possible automatically, so if you plan on playing this one online, your best bet will be to hit up message boards and start trading friend codes; not the most intuitive online system.
©2008-01-23, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved