A jack of all trades but a master of none?

Racing games have come a long way haven’t they? I mean, does anyone out there remember Pole Position? The classic of its time, where all you needed to do was come first and avoid other cars on the road. I remember Super Hang On where the scenery changed for the first time.  I even remember Out Run which was the first game to change the flat landscape into an environment of hills, valleys and introduce multiple racing routes into the genre  – and where the sit down cabinet would try and give some kind of feeling of inertia to the whole sentiment of racing. Heck, you could even pick your favourite track off the radio and drive to it. Then there was Lotus Esprit Challenge which encouraged the actual need for braking and changing lanes and on completion of the game you could send off for a licence style certificate.

All of that changed. In no time at all we had Ridge Racer, Road Rash, Destruction Derby, the grand daddy of racing – Gran Turismo – and a whole host of other racing games which changed forever the nature of the genre. Unless you were driving round in the largest rims, customising your ride, maxing out your turbo, driving to the most bangin’ tracks, having the most spectacular crashes or catching the most amount of air in the biggest leaps – even if you were in a tank – you weren’t nothing but Pee-wee Herman in the racing stakes.

Nail’d hails from the ‘more you have is the more you need’ variety of extreme racing. The sort of experience where you can never get enough of a dangerous thing, and the type of game play which is akin to a funfair ride where you scream if you want to go faster and the little kid next to you either cries for mummy or throws up.

In Nail’d you get to race either an ATV or a motorbike and travel all over the world competing in extreme racing events. It takes great joy in providing hills, leaps, jumps, an insane rollercoaster type track and, oh yeah – obstacles – and throws these at you as fast as your retinas can possibly take it. In the background, unhinged verbaholic rock music is barely audible above the crackly and poorly sampled sound of your engine while you hit the boost button as much as you can and do all you can to stay on your vehicle long enough to come first. From the start you learn to forget about the common definition of a jump – this game provides some Evel Knievel thousand-foot leaps over chasms that will literally leave your heart in your mouth.

On the surface of it, this all sounds fun, and to start with Nail’d is exactly that – a thrilling, vivid experience. In truth, I have to commend software developers Techland for cramming in so many jaw-dropping leaps and incredible speed into this game. The action is incredibly fast, and the track design is ambitious, and at times excellent. Racing through valleys and leaping onto dams is impressively executed, utterly thrilling and disorientating, and like an amusement park ride of your wildest hallucination.

The biggest problem with this game though is that after a short time, cracks start to show in its presentation and in the game mechanics. It tries to be too much of everything without ever allowing itself to be committed to any real type of game play. As a result, it tragically falls flat and lacks any motivating factors to even play more than a couple of stages let alone a full tournament.

Most gamers know that motion blur – while being an effective way to emphasise speed – can also hide a multitude of sins. Once you see past it, the first thing you notice is the graphics. They are poorly rendered, dressed up with motion blur – ‘mutton dressed as lamb’.  Just like the colleague you regret snogging at that Christmas party. At a distance and with so much going on, it actually looked quite good, but up close and personal – and in this case after a crash – you can see it instantly for what it is.

Another area where this game comes short is with the physics engine. For some reason, gravity doesn’t exist here. Not only can you change direction in mid-air but you can also extend your jump by a few miles. I reckon that in the world of Nail’d you could literally take a jump in England and glide over to France and not break a sweat, just by pulling back on the analogue stick. The first couple of times you feel like it is actually a nice touch, but if I am honest, it isn’t actually the hardest thing to do. When every corner brings a new jump, repetitiveness sets in remarkably quickly and that’s when you feel that there isn’t enough of a challenge and you are just going through the motions.

Although there is a ‘boost’ function typical of racing games of this genre, it was appalling to find that it isn’t actually linked to anything. Unlike Pure for example you have no abilities to do stunts in mid-air, there is no drift, no oncoming traffic, no punch or kick buttons to knock other riders off their vehicles, so there are no redeemable ways to reward your racing skills other than when you land correctly after a jump. Boost increments are painfully limited to driving or flying through gates at key positions on the tracks. I kept thinking: “Is this all?’ Are you serious?” It is mind-boggling just how much of a wasted opportunity this is, and the simple inclusion of something, anything extra would have boosted this game’s playability no end.

My final gripe comes with the collision detection. It leaves so much to be desired. For example, it is possible to keep driving after a head-on collision with a train, only to clip the top of a branch on the next landing. It is incidents like these that make coming first more a matter of luck than of actual skill, and in some places, to my horror, I found it was more than adequate to race around the track without ever taking my finger off the gas at all – relegating the brake to no more than reverse. I ended up wondering whether the game was play tested at all.

So my final verdict? As if you really need to hear this. Well, Nail’d is one of those games that sounds great in principle, but falls on its face because it tries to do too much while failing to get the basics right. At its heart, there is a fun arcade racer in there somewhere, waiting to be let out, but it is a delusion of grandeur. Against the likes of other well known titles such as Pure, Motorstorm, and Split Second, this doesn’t even stand a chance of coming third across the line. There is so much more that they could have done with this. It is such a real shame that at the end of the day, it deserves to be left on the grid.

3/10