Product Review: Nail’d ATV Racing Video Game
Big Air and Average Thrills on the Small Screen
By: Jason Giacchino
What is it?
Nail’d is an arcade style off-road racing game for 1 to 12 players for PC, X-Box 360, and Playstation 3 platforms. It retails for .99 and hit store shelves on November 30, 2010.
Setting Up:
Unlike really staging an off-road tournament, going from your couch to competition in Nail’d is as simple as inserting the game disc into your console of choice and getting a good grip on your controller.
The core of the game lies in career mode, where you select your ATV or bike and proceed to traverse through several courses in a bid to capture a championship.
A majority of the races here require finishing three laps around a course or through stunt challenges, where you’re judged on your completion time and the difficulty of the tricks you string together in the process. While this concept is simple enough, here tricks can include launching through flaming hoops, taking out as many other competitors as possible, to simply landing a 5,000-foot jump. We wish we were making that last one up, but alas, this is part of the Nail’d experience for better or worse.
Additionally there’s multiplayer racing for single track competition and support for up to 12 simultaneous players online.
Game Play:
It doesn’t take long to realize Nail’d is less about bar-to-bar racing where perfect timing and nerves of steel separate the winner from the last-place finisher (like in real life) so much as it’s about piloting low-orbit hovercrafts that just happen to resemble quads and motorcycles.
The name of the game is actually derived from the fact that “nailing” or taking-out other competitors is a big part of the formula here. Naturally that means another big part of success is avoiding being nailed by others (be they computer controlled or being piloted by other human beings).
Race success is a matter of boosting one’s way through courses loaded with potential ATV hazards ranging from airborne drops the length of mountainsides to well, hot air balloons.
Which brings us to our next point: Nail’d is about big air. Like Supercross triple big air? Freestyle ramp-to-ramp big air? Don’t be foolish, such things are small potatoes; here we’re talking one mountaintop to the next kind of hang time. And with such flights comes a whole new set of challenges: Rotating turbine blades, flocks of hot air balloons, and an occasional blimp or two. Any bigger air and the FAA would require these ATV riders to apply for pilot’s licenses!
The Bad:
While the concept of sailing a mile through the air and landing unharmed is the stuff of dreams for riders and racers the world over, Nail’d does have a few frustrating elements that should be acknowledged.
First it’s pretty darn impossible to determine what criteria are taken into consideration when it comes to the act of demolishing your ATV. You may leap over the Hoover Dam unharmed only to send your machine to the netherworld in an explosion of flames and smoke due to clipping a bush or worse still, full detonation by hitting the face of the ramp intended to send you sailing across the Grand Canyon.
Then there’s the matter of staying on the course. This isn’t an unreasonable requirement in the real world nor is it too much to ask in most race games either. However in Nail’d the combination of ridiculous speed coupled to ridiculous air coupled to no clear course markers all results in very frequent respawning just when you felt like things were starting to come together.
Odds and Ends:
The soundtrack is atypical jock rock/ scream driven ensemble that grows old after only a few sessions. Like the rest of the game, adequate but not quite inspired.
Nail’d isn’t a bad game so much as it is a silly (but potentially fun) concept plagued by odd physics. Occasionally the game comes together just long enough to offer a hint of what its designers surely had in mind when planning this one out but more often than not, the racing experience is fairly unfulfilling. During long cold winter nights, there are certainly worse ways to keep entertained but suffice to say, Nail’d is a far cry from the thrill that is really riding.
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