Offroad Extreme! Special Edition for Wii Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Tight control. A smooth framerate. Polished graphics. Lots of variety. These descriptions have no place in a review of Offroad Extreme! Special Edition for Wii. They are verbal tourists walking through a very seedy part of town, and if they don't catch a taxi soon – perhaps off to a review of Super Mario Galaxy -- they're going to be beaten, robbed, raped or murdered. Now, words like archaic, malfunctioned and offensive – these are descriptors that belong in this review, for this new racing game would be mechanically and aesthetically broken if it were released a decade ago, let alone today. It is not only a graphical turd, skipping along inconsistently at 20 frames or fewer, but it is nearly unplayable; you're supposed to be able to tilt the Wii remote to control your monster trucks and buggies a la Excite Truck, but vehicular reaction time is so sluggish that you'll sometimes wonder if you're even influencing the on-screen action.





We recently rated the unimpressive Cruis'n a 3.0 rating, so it really says something that by comparison Midway's disappointment is still the far superior experience.







In Offroad Extreme! From developer Data Design Interactive and publisher Conspiracy Entertainment, you choose a big truck, jeep or buggy and then race over a slim selection of different landscapes. There are only a handful of different gameplay modes, all of them basic – single race, time trails, challenge mode, etc. To its credit, the title features a comprehensive "how to play" tutorial, but unfortunately lacks an accompanying "why to play" one. Indeed, even the "how to play" element barely touches on the basics of how controls should work and it glosses over the fundamental shortcomings. While extremely shallow, the core concept of a high-flying monster truck racing experience is hidden deeply within Offroad Extreme! The problem is that the execution is so poor on all levels that the end product is neither fun nor interesting. Sloppy controls are incredibly unresponsive, making simple turns nearly impossible on a regular basis. There are all sorts of collision and camera bugs. If you go in reverse, for example, the camera may become stuck in a view that shows the front of your vehicle. The framerate is unacceptably sluggish – had this been the result of system-pushing graphics, that would be one thing, but Offroad Extreme! is also one of the ugliest games on Wii, with ridiculously blurry textures, low-polygon worlds, and little in the way of textural diversity. We could go on, but there's little point. All you really need to know is that this is one of Wii's worst games and it should be avoided at all costs.

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