Like my previous Wii review outing - GT Pro Series - Monster 4x4 World Circuit comes from Ubisoft in a big box housing both the game and steering wheel: a three-piece unit which, when assembled, holds the Wii Remote in its centre for some "hyper realistic racing fun!"
Let's start out by clearing up one thing: Monster trucks are ace. Redneck America has brought us some great things, such as corndogs, rampant gun ownership and the ability to sleep with your big-titted cousin. Within this cultural bounty, the pastime of making rudely powerful destruction machines ranks very highly. Videogame adaptations of monster truck events have been something of a staple of the industry for years, though no single game since Super Off Road Racer has really captured the masses. Perhaps this will be the start of something brilliant?
Well no, the sad truth is that it isn't. Ubi's been peddling this disjointed franchise throughout 2006, with versions cropping up earlier this year. While this Wii title isn't exactly a port of the very mediocre budget racer, it is based on the same principles, and as such, offers the same rather tepid gamplay based around the same list of fundamental flaws.
The main game concept is simple - race around tracks and come first. This surface simplicity is hampered by some serious failings to the point that Monster 4x4 World Circuit plummets down the scale of desirability. So what went wrong?
After my sessions with GT Pro, it would honestly be impossible to see any new game as anything but astonishingly beautiful. However, even this reality filter soon wears thin. M4x4WC pales when compared to truly bespoke Wii software and does look decidedly last-gen; you could be playing an under par Xbox title or a decent PlayStation 2 game.
The backgrounds, trucks and items don't look terrible, nor do they look great. I would have hoped that, faced with what is essentially a beefed up GameCube development kit to play with, the coders would have tried to drag something special out of the bag. The settings make reference to some of the world's more prestigious historical locations, though these are generally lost, a glimpse of what might be The Acropolis is nothing more than nebulous blob.
The tracks all look the same, with the odd themed object cropping up in the background. None of the in-game objects and items are terrible, they just scrape a minimum standard of performance for a videogame, making no effort to push things in any way.
No Audio Dynamite
Audio engineers, pay attention. There are jobs for you in the games industry. The game developer needs your help: help in explaining to the project manager why his grand vision is wrong, why keeping things on-style doesn't always make for a better game. I felt aurally abused after seven hours with this game and the noise it blares out. I am patient with game sound (my wife plays Super Nintendo or DS in the car everywhere we go). I've always quite enjoyed having videogame noise in my environment as I find the sounds of someone involved in playing to be soothing and good for general thinking purposes. Not so with 4x4 World Circuit. Take badly-sampled crowd roar blended with horrible engine drone and garnish this with Casio keyboard drum-fills whenever something happens to make things 'exciting'. Turn the SFX down and you are presented with what can only be described as a series of looped intros from the worst kind of modern heavy-metal butt-rock, playing over and over again. Bad doesn't even cover it.
Playing 4x4 World Circuit brings little restitution for the full-price asking amount and, though gameplay isn't as bad as it might have been, the game itself suffers one major flaw: it just isn't fun.
Monster 4x4 is one of those racing games where you find yourself pottering around the tracks because that's what the game tells you to do. It seems that in some parts of the development fraternity, the idea of making a game that works has overtaken the underpinning concept of making it actually fun to play. It took me a while to figure out exactly what was wrong with this game, why it came in under average. Simply put, it's a chore to play and feels unrewarding throughout.
Championship mode requires you to enter lots and lots of races in a seemingly endless cycle of holding down a button to go along, and steering with the aforementioned peripheral. A great deal of what's wrong stems from the fact you don't actually control your truck. It looks a bit like you do as its wheels turn and its body rolls. What actually happens is that you control the course.
Steering simply pushes the environment in the opposite direction to that steered, the truck remains firmly stuck to the lower middle of the screen. This one error relegates the game to the leagues of the almost unplayable. A game I was quite looking forward to (hey, it's racing, right?) became a game I loathed having to play.
Let's start out by clearing up one thing: Monster trucks are ace. Redneck America has brought us some great things, such as corndogs, rampant gun ownership and the ability to sleep with your big-titted cousin. Within this cultural bounty, the pastime of making rudely powerful destruction machines ranks very highly. Videogame adaptations of monster truck events have been something of a staple of the industry for years, though no single game since Super Off Road Racer has really captured the masses. Perhaps this will be the start of something brilliant?
Well no, the sad truth is that it isn't. Ubi's been peddling this disjointed franchise throughout 2006, with versions cropping up earlier this year. While this Wii title isn't exactly a port of the very mediocre budget racer, it is based on the same principles, and as such, offers the same rather tepid gamplay based around the same list of fundamental flaws.
The main game concept is simple - race around tracks and come first. This surface simplicity is hampered by some serious failings to the point that Monster 4x4 World Circuit plummets down the scale of desirability. So what went wrong?
After my sessions with GT Pro, it would honestly be impossible to see any new game as anything but astonishingly beautiful. However, even this reality filter soon wears thin. M4x4WC pales when compared to truly bespoke Wii software and does look decidedly last-gen; you could be playing an under par Xbox title or a decent PlayStation 2 game.
The backgrounds, trucks and items don't look terrible, nor do they look great. I would have hoped that, faced with what is essentially a beefed up GameCube development kit to play with, the coders would have tried to drag something special out of the bag. The settings make reference to some of the world's more prestigious historical locations, though these are generally lost, a glimpse of what might be The Acropolis is nothing more than nebulous blob.
The tracks all look the same, with the odd themed object cropping up in the background. None of the in-game objects and items are terrible, they just scrape a minimum standard of performance for a videogame, making no effort to push things in any way.
No Audio Dynamite
Audio engineers, pay attention. There are jobs for you in the games industry. The game developer needs your help: help in explaining to the project manager why his grand vision is wrong, why keeping things on-style doesn't always make for a better game. I felt aurally abused after seven hours with this game and the noise it blares out. I am patient with game sound (my wife plays Super Nintendo or DS in the car everywhere we go). I've always quite enjoyed having videogame noise in my environment as I find the sounds of someone involved in playing to be soothing and good for general thinking purposes. Not so with 4x4 World Circuit. Take badly-sampled crowd roar blended with horrible engine drone and garnish this with Casio keyboard drum-fills whenever something happens to make things 'exciting'. Turn the SFX down and you are presented with what can only be described as a series of looped intros from the worst kind of modern heavy-metal butt-rock, playing over and over again. Bad doesn't even cover it.
Playing 4x4 World Circuit brings little restitution for the full-price asking amount and, though gameplay isn't as bad as it might have been, the game itself suffers one major flaw: it just isn't fun.
Monster 4x4 is one of those racing games where you find yourself pottering around the tracks because that's what the game tells you to do. It seems that in some parts of the development fraternity, the idea of making a game that works has overtaken the underpinning concept of making it actually fun to play. It took me a while to figure out exactly what was wrong with this game, why it came in under average. Simply put, it's a chore to play and feels unrewarding throughout.
Championship mode requires you to enter lots and lots of races in a seemingly endless cycle of holding down a button to go along, and steering with the aforementioned peripheral. A great deal of what's wrong stems from the fact you don't actually control your truck. It looks a bit like you do as its wheels turn and its body rolls. What actually happens is that you control the course.
Steering simply pushes the environment in the opposite direction to that steered, the truck remains firmly stuck to the lower middle of the screen. This one error relegates the game to the leagues of the almost unplayable. A game I was quite looking forward to (hey, it's racing, right?) became a game I loathed having to play.