If there was ever a game title at odds with itself, surely Excite Truck is it. Let’s face it; trucks aren’t very exciting at all, are they? Huge hulking monstrosities that mostly carry fruit, vegetables and general produce from A to B, whilst also spending their time having great fun blocking both lanes on dual carriageways in their inept attempts to overtake something. Then again, a title like Mundane Truck or Get Out My Bloody Way Truck might not have sold too many copies of the game (well, the last one might), so we’re going to have to like it and lump it.

To be fair, despite initial misgivings it is actually a pretty pleasing thing for me to be able to say that Excite Truck is a pretty decent arcade romp. Making full use of the Wii-remote for the control system and offering a selection of rather hectic races across a pretty decent selection of terrain, the game actually ends up being on of the Wii’s finer titles to date. Whilst this might not be saying much due to the rather lacking line-up of Nintendo’s latest machine, it would be pretty unfair to say that Excite Truck is simply a decent title amongst a wave of mediocrity.

The main thing Excite Truck gets right, as you’d pretty much expect of something which has had Nintendo casting their eagle-eyed glances over it from day one, is that it’s rather good fun. This is helped in no small way by the control method, which sees the player holding the Wii-remote sideways and tiling it left or right to steer, with the 1 and 2 buttons being the throttle and brake. As with Excite games of yore (namely Bike and Bike 64), there’s a boost system that encourages the player to manage the temperature of their engine, with people who are a little spendthrift with the turbo juice having their trucks crawl at frustratingly slow speed unless they ease off and allow the temperature to dip again.

All this would have got thrown out of the window had the motion control system been as fun as being repeatedly punched in the face with a concrete glove, but thankfully control over your truck is intuitive and tight enough to avoid any such frustrations. Not that this should lull you into thinking that you’ll pick the thing up and instantly be fantastic; despite the game’s arcade roots it will take you a tutorial and a good few races to begin to accrue the skills you’ll need to race to a decent level. Initial experiments will more than likely see you wildly overcompensating and slamming into pretty much everything the scenery offers.

Sometimes this can actually be of benefit, especially when it comes to the game’s Excite Race modes. These are in effect a series of races that you tackle in sequence, with good performances on each allowing you to move on to the next. Performance isn’t necessarily all about crossing the finishing line first either, as during the races you’ll tot up stars for performing stunts over jumps, by ramming into other trucks or just generally doing exciting things. Each race has a set total of points that you need in order to clear it, and although finishing first will give you a sizeable chunk of these you will still need to take every opportunity to rack up the stars as you go or you’ll be stuffed.

To help you along your way, the game gives you a couple of nifty power-ups at various points of each circuit. The most interesting of these completely deforms the terrain around you and gives you the chance to access some areas otherwise out-of-reach, which itself technically means that there are about five or six different routes through which you can drive on any given lap depending on whether you choose to hit a power-up or not. This certainly adds a tactical edge to the game and gives a bit of added replay value to proceedings, and heading back and upping your star score on each circuit to obtain higher ranks will take up a surprisingly enjoyable slice of your time.

In fact, it’s a fair point to say that pretty much the whole racing thing itself is enjoyable. Races usually take place over three laps and pit you against a number of other trucks, none of which is particularly bothered about keeping the racing clean. The circuits themselves usually involve whizzing over huge jumps and past clumps of nasty trees, and pleasingly the collision detection seems to hold up well enough so each time you crash it never really feels like the game being at fault, even if you’re tempted to shout at it anyway. Heck, even slamming into trucks and splashing your way through water pools is fun. It all makes for a fantastic arcade experience.

The problem is that it’s all over far too quickly. As you continue on through the challenge mode you unlock newer circuits and some trucks, but with a bit of work you can quite easily tank through it all and get everything within half a week or so. At this point the Excite Race mode will be exhausted along with the Challenge mode, which offers a number of individual races with targets set for getting through gates, smashing other trucks and the like. With this gone you’re going to have to rely on the multiplayer mode to keep the game going, and although racing against a mate to attain the highest score is fun, it offers little variety.

The shame is that, no matter how entertaining Excite Truck is (and it most certainly is), you’ll end up slotting it back into the box and leaving it within a remarkably quick time. It’s packed full of fun, it looks relatively attractive and it’s the first of hopefully many Wii games to allow you to replace the horrid soundtrack with your own tunes from an SD card, but there’s just not enough meat on the bone. It’s hard to shake the impression that it would serve as an ideal occasional rental rather than a full purchase, as unfair as that may be. Still, as far as racers go on the Wii this blows everything else currently available out of the water, and provides a heck of a lot of punch while it’s still going. For that reason at least you have to give developers Monster Games a pat on the back and hope that future games can carry on in the same vein with a little more longevity packed in to make it the must-buy title that Excite Truck came so close to being.