Nitrobike

Racing games on the Wii don’t have a great track record. Aside from Excite Truck and a couple of others, most of them are average at best, crippled by poor controls and limited features.

Nitrobike gets off to a good start with its controls, which are fun and intuitive. Hold the Wii remote and rotate it like a steering wheel, using the buttons to activate other functions. The bikes respond well, making it easy to pull off stunts as well as just generally pootle around the track.

Stunts add to your boost meter, which allows you to use the nitro of the title to give your bike a speed boost at the right moment.

Sadly the game is overshadowed by Excite Truck, Nintendo’s excellent arcade racer which uses very similar boost and stunt mechanics, with far superior visuals and gameplay.

Nitrobike suffers from several problems that make Excite Truck a more interesting proposition. The camera is fiddly, for one thing. Despite the great controls the camera has to tendency to offer the most awkward position; come off your bike and you’ll end up staring at your rider, then it’ll spin round wildly while you try to get back into the race.

The bikes are very fragile too, easily destroyed in a crash, but the game seems wildly inconsistent when it comes to how much damage you incur for collisions. Sometimes you can clip a bit of scenery and carry on, other times your bike is totalled.

Track design is largely unexciting also, with no alternate routes and little in the way of the jumps and other obstacles that make motorcross so exciting.  It doesn’t help that the muddy visuals are poor even for a Wii game.

Verdict: 45%

Excellent controls but the rest of the game is largely unexciting and often annoying. We recommend trying Excite Truck instead.