I have been personally waiting for Nail’d since it was first announced and we saw the first set of graphics and trailers from the game. Big air, off-road ATV/MTX racing action is always something that shows promise.
The major difference between Nail’d and its competitors are the in-air tricks. There simply are none in Nail’d which limits the game’s fun and action. But still the game is fun to play.
The game throws you into a pretty basic tutorial right from the get go so you can quickly get acquainted with the goal. But with only steering, accelerator, brake and boost, it doesn’t take a super genius to figure it out.
The game features 70 events across 14 tracks. There are three types of races that aren’t all that extremely different from each other. Simple race is just that, be the first to cross the finish line. Stunt challenge means you have to try and land some tricks (more on that in a bit) or nail some boost gates. When the first racer passes the finish, the scores of everyone else start to fall until they too finish. In Time Challenge you have to reach the next checkpoint before time runs out.
New DLC was just released that offers new tracks and a new mode, Detonator, which GDN will look into as soon as possible for review.
Those are the three races in the Tournament (single player) mode which is set up as a series of tournaments. Since the tricks in the game are quite limited Stunt challenge isn’t really all that different from standard racing. You get trick points for things like doing a wheelie, landing on all wheels simultaneously, riding through a tunnel on the side of a curved wall, hitting boost gates, etc. But there’s no in-game list of what they all are so you might have to search for them online if you care (I will dig up a list at the end of the review).
So what’s left? Well, some pretty awesome, high-flying, massively-fast racing. A race is between one and three laps and can run you in the three to six or seven minute range. I find myself often gripping the controller pretty tightly even though I know there’s not really going to be any impact when I touch down after a hundred foot fall. That shows some of the immersion factor for the game though. You feel like you need to hold on tight and that goes a long way towards making this game decent.
