Monster 4X4: World Circuit [Wii]

"Yep, this game sucks...if you're a gamer. My six-year-old, who digs the crap out of monster trucks is smitten. Yeah, it's simple, that's why it's great for kids. No violence and easy to play. The steering wheel is a big hit too. "

"Of course it's hard to avoid comparing this with Excite Truck, so I won't. I love Excite Truck, it's sooo much fun. Monster 4x4 isn't, it's boring even.
In Excite Truck the tracks are excellent, especially the many short-cuts, cool jump spots, racing through water, etc... In Monster 4x4 the tracks lack any imagination, they're short and bland. And they're all very similar too, even though they are supposedly located in exotic places like Athens, Barcelona, Moscow or San Francisco. Boooorrrinnnnggg.. Excite Truck's graphics are much better too.
At first glance the control system is similar, tilt the controller left and right to steer. But for some reason it works out great in Excite truck, but sucks in Monster 4x4. It feels like you are rotating the track beneath the car, as opposed to steering the car itself, very weird.

Ubisoft was smart to make sure this game was released before Excite Truck (it was a Wii launch game even), so they could shift some copies of it. But now Excite Truck is available, I really see no reason to buy Monster 4x4. I am glad I didn't, I borrowed it from a friend, just out of curiosity. He had already told me it wasn't very good and he was right.

Oh, BTW: Am I the only who is confused by menu interface in the World Circuit mode? After completing one race, on the results screen, if you choose Continue, the game asks "Are you sure you want to exit?" Eh no, I don't want to exit, I want to continue to the next race. So I choose No, which brings me back to the results screen. It turns out you have to choose Yes there. Weird, has this thing been play-tested at all?"

"Hehe.. this game, if you would even go as far as to call it a game, totally sucks. We have been making fun of it for like a week now saying it's the best game ever. Imagine: "hey man have you been playing Zelda on the Wii last night?" -=- "no dude, I've been playing Monster 4x4 the whole night! DUH! It's like totally awesome!!".

Yeh yeh, I could've known it was going to be this bad, but I just wanted the steering wheel. I had two options: this game or GT Racing or something. Both games looked like crap judging from the back of the box, so I went for the most unrealistic one (with jumping cars and such): I got Monster 4x4.

First the good things, the steering works really nice. Not very realistic that you can twist and turn your car whilst airborne, but quite useful nonetheless. Even without the steer it's pretty easy to get control over any car in the game. Good tutorial as well, explaining how jumps can boost you, and how to use boosts or pickups.

That's about it for the good things. The rest basically is bad. I won't say every single thing I don't like, but since I like to rant, I will do some.

Graphics. Look I know the Wii isn't that much of a graphic machine and that it's more of a fun machine, but this is PlayStation graphics!! It looks like they went to the toilet and just pooped on the game. It worked: it looks real crappy.

Multiplayer. Although multiplayer can be fun at times, the bad graphics and the small screens (even on a 37" LCD) will make you wonder where you are. We played with 3 players simultaniously and it was pretty boring. By the way it took us like 15 minutes (for crying out loud!) to do multiplayer. Stupid thing is that when you go to the multiplayer screen, you don't have the option to hook up more controllers. What you need to do is press the home button, and hook up more controllers via that way (controller set up >> reset controllers). Sigh!

I tried the single player mode as well, competing against the PC. It's so easy you're wondering what's going on with the A.I. (did the programmers just made it so you would make first place and they could cancel out the opponents? So they wouldn't have to program that much? eh?).

After all this poop that was thrown in my face I decided not to try the minigames. Screw this, I'm going to play Wii tennis again.

This one doesn't even get 1 out of 5, it gets 0. But since that's not an option, there you go, 1 out of 5 for the trouble. Please god please, next time make these programmers poop out something better. Or at least make them whipe their a**. :) I love to rant when I can."