Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What The Game's About
Nitrobike follows in the proud footsteps of popular racing games such as Excite Truck and Excitebike 64. Excited? Well, this Ubisoft-published title does have the development studio behind the latter pulling the strings this time around. Choose a punky racer, pick an awesome dirtbike, and then hit the track for a bunch of extreme racing action. There's traditional racing, elimination challenges where the racer trailing the pack is removed from the race after each lap, ring-smashing precision racing, time trials, and much more. The controls even take a major inspiration from Excite Truck with its tilt steering action and boost controls assigned to the Wii remote's control pad. When the single-player modes grow dull then there's always multiplayer racing action both local and online.

What's Hot
One would almost think that the developer mapped out the Nitrobike project's goals by playing Excite Truck and saying "Let's do that, but with dirtbikes!" That turns out to be a good thing, as Nitrobike edges out Excite Truck in a few key areas. There are a wider variety of tricks available which when performed properly can help boost top speed and essentially "level up" bikes. On the whole the Nitrobike experience is what one would expect from a spiritual successor to the Excite franchise.

Online multiplayer is the best thing that this game has going for it as up to six players can try and outspeed one another. During a two-player online racing test we were easily able to browse the Friends List for active Nitrobikers and maintain a connection with no noticeable lag or dropped connections*. Note that the game uses a second Friend Code that is different that the general Wii Friend Code used to register friends for sending Wii-mail. Of course, those without Nitrobiking friends can allow the game to set up matches against random anonymous players.


What's Not
Those aforementioned tricks can be difficult to perform. Tricks are activated by pressing the proper combination of boost control pad directions, meaning that it's far too easy to overload the boost meter and cause the bike to explode with a single mispress. Additionally, some of the tracks contain what look like guaranteed shortcuts that are actually out-of-bounds areas, meaning that roaring off down a potential secret path just resets the bike back on the track with a few seconds lost as penalty.

Nitrobike also seems to be cribbing a little from, of all things, The Simpsons in that just about everything on some of the various tracks is capable of exploding with little or no provocation. One particular track is located at what has to be a damaged jet engine depository, and these chunks of aircraft debris scattered everywhere burst into flames repeatedly whenever a dirtbike draws near. Combine that with the punky racer characters and it just seems that Nitrobike is trying just a little too hard to be extreme (read: X-TREEEEEEEME!). This doesn't diminish the gameplay any, but it does get to be tiring and a little ridiculous after a while.

Final Word
Fans of Excite Truck should check out Nitrobike. Fans of Excitebike 64 should definitely check out Nitrobike. Everyone else itching for a new Wii racing game should at least consider renting it.

* Total disclosure: the gaming session was terminated by a dropped connection, although we're told that's the fault of our opponent's router shutting down and not Nitrobike itself.