It’s hard for any game to try to reinvent the wheel, especially when its seen its fair share of games in that genre. Sometimes though when a game thinks its bringing something new, it is really bringing something old. Nail’d is an arcade ATV/MX racer with an emphasis on big jumps and speed. The game is all about throwing a bunch of stuff at you during the course and how fast you can get to the finish line. Doesn’t seem like a hard thing to master? However what you get is a racer with great track ideas but spotty collision detection and some overall uninspiring execution.
The Tournament mode is where you’ll spend most of your time as it’ll unlock new tracks, parts to put on your vehicles and other goodies. All the parts will give your vehicle different variations of speed, handling and boost for you to make your own customizations. Most races are track lap courses but throw in occasional segmented races and mods. Nothing to out of the ordinary here as there is no story, which is not necessary and the difficulty starts to get steep after a good amount of tourney’s completed. The game could use a bigger variety of race variants to play with as it can get old pretty fast.
The games tracks are where it shines the most. Cool effects like mud and water covering the screen when you go over them is a nice touch, although it sometimes makes it hard to see something in front of you when it happens. Most of the time you will be dodging crazy obstacles or jumping over objects while your racing. Everything from trains, to hot air balloons or jumping from one side of a bridge to another is some of the stuff you will experience. Multiple paths are almost in every corner which give you split second decisions on where to go next, this is something that should be taken note for other racers.
Other modes are Off-Road which will allow you to do Time Attack, Quick Event and Custom Tournaments which is all pretty self explanatory. The game has multiplayer system link (not sure why there is no split screen) and even has online multiplayer. The online multiplayer is 12 players but got difficult to get full games in. The cool thing is that it will allow you to get into a race that has already started and allow you to spectate which most racers don’t do nowadays. One of our biggest gripes with the online was that if you crashed in the game it would take twice as long then the single player to come back in, which can pretty much kill your chances of winning a race. They should allow you to come back instantaneously.
With all of this there are some serious issues with the game that should be taken note of. Sometimes the game seems to fast for its own good. While you may be thinking that a straight path is the right direction, your actually going out of bounce. In some courses you can be in the middle of the track and all of a sudden crash because it detects that your out of bounce. While the music is form fitting for the game, it seems really dated, doesn’t offer any variety since its only rock and I can recall most tracks being in the Tony Hawk series or other racers. Not to mention that it gets insanely repetitive as fast as one play through for about an hour or two. The game also lacks any real desire to experiment while your in a race. Sure it has a dozen different ways to go about a race but since your only real premise is to adjust yourself in air before you land or try to get in fire rings for a boost, it kind of feels empty. Although this is trying to convey speed which it does somewhat well it would have been nice to see some sort of trick system while doing a big jump.
Nail’d does a couple of things well like have nice big environments with an great amount of routes, an extreme sense of speed, adds ATV’s, MX, replays, leaderboards and spectator. The game just feels unpolished most of the time, with weird out of bounce areas and dated gameplay that could be helped by inclusion of more modes or things to do during the race. There is fun here especially with other friends, I had a good time racing on newer areas and seeing how fast I can make it around a course but some fixes to the overall framework of the game would be great for the sequel.
[starreviewmulti id=2 tpl=20]
Overall = 7.0
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