It's been a long strange journey for the developers at Monster Games in Minnesota. They've progressed from a handful of NASCAR titles to Test Drive: Eve of Destruction to Excite Truck and now to Excitebots: Truck Trick Racing, their first game that has nothing whatsoever to do with the heartland of America and everything to do with embracing the Wii aesthetic. Yeah, sure, it's a good racing game. But has it really come to this?

Read the review after the jump.

Not to complain overmuch. Everything great in Excitebots -- and there's plenty -- is mostly carried over directly from Excite Truck, a launch Wii game that early on proved what the Wii could really do: slick tilt control steering, gorgeous supersmooth graphics, just enough stunt trickery to add flavor to the racing, and some nifty tracks with distinct gimmicks. In fact, I'm pretty sure Excitebots uses the exact same tracks from Excite Truck. I recognize that tanker in Finland and that castle in Scotland.

Which was my first clue that this isn't a sequel. It's Excite Truck repurposed for the Wii. The tracks are peppered with cutesy gimmicks. I suppose I'm okay with simply pressing a button to throw a pie at a clown's face for a few more points. But when it comes to flailing around with the Wiimote as if I were playing some sort of Wario Ware spazz-out minigame, I am not amused. I didn't sign on for this. I'm here to play an arcade racer. I just want to drive and drive fast. Besides, I still have no idea what I'm supposed to do in a couple of the minigames when my little bot grabs a bar and spins around it. What is that animated instruction telling me to do? Push? Spin? Wave? Oh, too late, I've crashed.

Also, I'm not sold on the bot concept. Instead of trucks, you get bots that have only a tentative claim to being bots. Instead, they look like some sort of cheap plastic doo-dad that comes with a Happy Meal. They're very cute, and I don't intend that as a compliment. You get a bat, a grasshopper, a little centipede, an adorable spider, and so forth. And the unlockable system seems predicated on the assumption that I care enough to pay a quarter of a million points to buy hearts instead of dots for my ladybug. I don't.

There are a couple of really nice twists. There's poker racing, which hurts my head. But I can see the appeal. As you drive around the track, you have to make split-second decisions about what cards you're going to drive over to add to your hand. Do you go for the three of a kind or hold out for the flush? Do you even bother with the mental calculation for a straight flush? Can your brain spare the CPU cycles to work that decision out? Mine can't. And as I said before, I signed on the race, not to play Wii minigames and not to think. But I'm glad to see poker racing for people who have the spare brain power.

Then there's the excellent online racing. It's easy as pie, smooth as ice cream, and only about half as cloyingly cute as a Mario Kart game. It's also got a wonderfully addictive betting system where you put up an amount of money that you can multiply based on a combination of how well you do and what sort of random multiplier you roll after the race has ended. I'll leave it to others to worry about whether this encourages kids to gamble. But for me, this is the sort of hassle-free and rewarding multiplayer that works perfectly for a mindless arcade racing game.

And although I'm complaining a fair bit, the whole package is pretty good even if it is mostly an Excite Truck redux. As much as I can sit here and complain, I can't deny that I'm happy to race my way through these world tracks again, to try to improve my scores, and to ultimately plug away at the scores I need to unlock the advanced Excite Race mode. At which point I'm sure I'll spend even more time with the game. And eventually, I'll probably have more than enough money to drive a ladybug with hearts instead of dots on it.

So, rats. I guess you got me after all, Monster Games.