Nail'd

If there was ever a direct polar opposite to the precise and refined motoring found in racing simulations like the Forza and Gran Turismo series, this is it. This is the motorsport game that spits on those fancy, upper-class sims. If Forza is the captain of the polo team with the posh accent and a degree in classical music, Nail’d is the game that dropped out of high school, drinks cheap whiskey and listens to Motley Crüe records in its basement. It may be uncouth, rough around the edges, but at the same time it’s brimming with unfocused energy and a sort of hillbilly charm, making for a blisteringly fast and enjoyable - but ultimately shallow - arcade racer.

Before you even slot the key into the ignition it’s important that you understand that Nail’d wants nothing to do with silly things like realistic vehicle physics or delicate throttle control. Instead the focus is squarely on speed, dirt and air - although not necessarily in that order. If you’re going to make it in the Nail’d leagues what you really need is an affinity for high-adrenalin racing, a total disregard for your safety on the track, and an extremely heavy accelerator finger.

In the very best of arcade-style racing traditions, Nail’d is a full-throttle blast right from the start. A symphony of thrashy guitar riffs and engine noise punctuates the air as the field of ATV’s and dirt bikes line up for take off, the flag drops, and everything decays into an orchestrated mess of mud and wheels and petrol fumes. Within moments you are weaving through a forest of pine trees, bouncing off of the roof of a moving train, smashing opponents into a passing helicopter in mid air - all at brain-bending speeds. It’s a wild ride, make no mistake.

If a racing game’s success lies in its ability to portray the feeling of speed, then Techland has scored a podium finish with Nail’d. Using a combination of clever camera angles and motion blur techniques, Nail’d not only feels and looks fast, it can be down right overwhelming at times. The idea here is to go fast, go hard; all the time - a motoring game plan that is accentuated by a turbo boost feature to propel you to even greater speeds. Your first few minutes with one of these vehicles can be somewhat disconcerting as your brain tries to get used to the manic pace of it all.

This alone makes Nail’d worth a spin, even just to experience the thrill of being hurled through the air on a dirt bike at speeds that make your eyes water. The engine that powers this raucous high-velocity thrill ride is surprisingly slick, doing an impressive job especially in terms of the vast and detailed environments as they smear past in a blur. Even though each race environment - crafted from the landscapes of Greece, Arizona, Yosimite and the Andes - is extremely big and complex in design, there is never even a hint of frame rate drop.

Each track is a veritable playground for the off-road adrenalin junkie. Full of branching paths and alternate routes, it’s almost impossible to learn and maintain a perfect racing line, and you won’t need to. Instead, races become a frantic and relentless roller coaster ride as you tear through the mud towards the finish line with no consideration for effective cornering or skillful overtaking. Showcasing the arcade stylings of Techland's thrill-fest is the amount of time your racer will spend soaring through the air. It’s absolutely bonkers the distances you will cover without touching the ground. Huge drops feel like they go on forever as you try to guide your dirt bike to avoid towers of rock, hot air balloons and other airborne obstacles. Yes, it sounds silly, and it is, but it’s also bloody marvelous for the first hour or so of over-the-top racing.

The sad thing is that Nail’d plays almost all of its best cards too early in the game. This is a momentum that was always going to be hard to maintain. The events are enthralling and can leave you stunned by a hammer-blow of speed and vehicular aggression, but that's really all there is to it. Race modes are very limited, with only a few variations on the basic “Drive like a bat out of Hell until the finish line" theme. The boost feature adds a bit of depth, requiring racers to achieve certain goals to refill the boost meter, but it’s far too generous with its handouts. The meter is filled for doing just about anything, and once you are on the juice it becomes almost impossible for your opponents to catch you.

A severe lack of challenge also cripples the excitement levels here. Getting to the front of the pack can take some doing, depending on the track and difficulty level, but once you get there - and you will get there, just about every time - they rarely come close to catching you. Even repeated crashes and respawns are usually not enough to make you lose your pole position. To compound the problem, an erratic respawn system will sometimes plop you back in the race in a better race position than before the crash. There were times when I careened into a cliff while fighting it out in fourth place or so, only to be revived straight into first. This makes the idea of competition somewhat pointless.

The unreal physics - nowhere as apparent as in the air, where you have the magical ability to turn corners while a hundred meters up - are passable as integral to the feel of the game, but there are other aspects which aren't as easily overlooked. Damage is terribly inconsistent, for one thing. Sometimes hitting a speeding bullet train head on will just nudge your bike off to the side, yet only moments later an uneven bit of ground could have your bike explode in a shower of bits. The complex tracks can also occasionally leave you bewildered, simply because the invisible boundaries are often poorly marked. This is especially a problem when navigating in mid air where it’s all too easy to drift off into no-mans-land, where your bike instantly self-destructs.

For the amount of work that was put into making the environments to make them look great and feel super fast, it’s a pity that other elements were left desperate for more polish. From the painfully generic menus and overall presentation, to the distinct lack of variety and race types on offer - there just isn't enough here to hold your interest beyond a couple of hours. Vehicle handling is unrefined and unremarkable, and quite why they even bothered giving you a brake is beyond me - be prepared for a painful accelerator finger once you’re done here. Even the vehicles and their riders are basic to say the least. Winning tournaments earns new parts and colour schemes, but these barely make a difference and just aren't worth the grind.

And that's the root of the problem with Nail’d: before long, the gripping high-intensity racing somehow, against all odds, becomes a grind. There are surprises along the way, mostly thanks to the very well executed level design, but these are only surprising the first time (such is the nature of surprises). Having to slog through lengthy tournaments which rehash the same tracks a few times eventually feels like more trouble than it’s worth. Play Nail'd for half an hour, and you won’t believe that the rush of the race could ever get old, but somehow it does.

There are good ideas here, mainly related to the exploration aspect of the vast environments and the innovative use of both the horizontal and vertical plane for exploring these muddy landscapes, but ultimately Nail’d falls short of its potential. The problem is that there just isn't enough to keep the excitement levels up once you get used to the speed and once you've raced the same tracks a few times. It’s too random to prompt you to care about improving on your best time, and the uninspired challenge from your AI opponents fails to ignite that competitive drive. Of course that desire to win can be sparked by getting dirty with with multiplayer modes, either via system link or Xbox LIVE. There’s no sign of a split screen option, but I’d guess that it would have been impossible to focus on your side of the screen when everything is moving so fast, so that’s no real loss. But again, as with the single-player modes, there aren't enough variations among the race options to keep most gamers interested for very long.

Techland's ability to deliver a sense of speed is truly something to behold, and the race environments offer a lot of backwoods real estate to explore, but as an all-out arcade racer, Nail'd lives fast but dies young. This is the kind of game that deserves at least an hour or two of your time, but because of its limited replayability, you'll want to wait until it hits the bargain bin.

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