Like Excite Truck, Excitebots is an arcade-style racing game with a focus on big jumps and lots of speed. The basic control profile is almost identical, with you holding the Wii Remote sideways, tilting it to steer. Excitebots also touts support for the Wii Steering Wheel, and you can buy the game bundled with the wheel, though the net effect is that you're tilting the remote in a slightly different way. The core handling is kind of mushy, but the track designs tend towards lots of straightaways and multitiered jumps, and they rarely feature serpentine turns that demand much more precision than what is offered. In a way, the handling actually magnifies the sensation that you are perpetually on the verge of going completely out of control--a sensation that I find elusive, but immensely satisfying.
It helps that, amongst the things you need to concern yourself with during a race, the actual racing isn't always at the top of the list. Regardless of which mode you're playing in Excitebots, stars are the metric by which success is determined. You'll earn some stars for finishing a race in a top position, but you'll get more for catching massive air, performing aerial tricks, drifting around corners, and slamming into other racers over the course of a race. The game will even toss you a star when you crash. The best way to earn stars, though, is by successfully activating the totally insane triggers that litter the tracks.
Now, if I haven't yet made this clear, the vehicles that you're driving in Excitebots are transforming-car robots that look like animals. It's mostly insects, but there are creatures like a bat, a mouse, and a turtle in the mix as well. I can't make much sense out of the reasoning behind the animal theme, but the fact that they're robots is material to the gameplay. You'll find wrench icons on specific sections of track, which will transform your car-bot into a leg-bot for a short stretch. It requires you to rock the remote back and forth to create speed, which makes steering even harder, though the upside is that you can move at incredible speeds, plowing through otherwise impenetrable obstacles.
If I have a complaint about Excitebots, it's that there doesn't seem to be a huge number of tracks in the game. The standard race mode consists of five different cups, and by the time you hit the third cup, you've seen just about all of them. It's less of an issue than it might seem, since the way bars and triggers are distributed can have a profound effect on how a track plays.
The online mode in Excitebots is pretty to-the-point, allowing you to jump into either a standard race or a poker race with randoms, or trade Excitebots-specific codes to play with your buddies. It's the very definition of irony that the way the whole friend code system has been implemented actually makes it profoundly more difficult to play with your friends than strangers, though to its credit, Excitebots allows you to send specific performance challenges and replays to folks who are on your general Wii friends list. What makes the online in Excitebots of particular interest to me is the way it will let you wager stars you've earned in other modes on an online race. Stars are basically currency in Excitebots, so the ability to lose them all or double your money based on your performance really heightens the risk/reward online.
As time passes, it gets harder and harder to find games that can actually offer a surprise, so I found the ways in which Excitebots managed to catch me off-guard to be quite pleasing. Even amongst its arcade-style ilk, Excitebots isn't a very nuanced racing game, but it's loud, ridiculous, and crazy enough to be plenty of fun anyway.
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