Nail’d is an offroad arcade style racer that has taken the laws of physics and blasted them out the window. Like a mid 90′s Mountain Dew commercial, nail’d is extreme to the max.

Think of it as an off-off road game. Races take place in the sky almost as often as on the ground. You’ll be leaping over speeding trains and flying over hot air balloons as you tear through the courses.

But does all this extreme-nessity make for a fun game?

Before we jump headfirst into this review I want to make you a promise. Although my inner Catskills comedian winces at the thought, I promise I will not use any cheesy nail’d puns. They are entirely too easy and not really worth it.

The best thing about nail’d is the games sense of speed. You really feel like you are flying around a mountain at ridiculous speeds. To go along with this tremendous sense of speed, nail’d is an arcade racer through and through. You don’t have to worry about weight distribution or pre-loading before a big jump, instead you have to make sure you don’t slam into the side of a mountain or a blimp as you launch yourself a thousand feet into the air. It reminds me a bit of SSX or Pure in that all the jumps are exaggerated to a ridiculous degree. If in real life you would fly 10 feet off a jump, in this game you fly 50. Some might be put off a bit by the looseness and speed of the game, but I enjoyed it.

The thing that will probably surprise most people is the way you gain boost. Instead of doing tricks in the air to build up turbo, you gain boost by either driving through fire gates or popping a wheelie. While this does keep your mind on the racing rather than on your combo, it also feels like a missed opportunity. You’re already 500 feet in the air, so it feels weird to not do some crazy trick while you’re at it. I kept checking the instruction manual to make sure I wasn’t missing something.

The races are fast, furious, and at least every level has a holy-&%$ moment where, what I thought was going to be a medium jump turned out to be a massive free fall. These are the moments where the game is at its best. You hit that jump and are flying through the air. As you look down, the ground is a couple hundred feet below you and vertigo hits as the ground comes rushing up to meet you.

The meat of the single player game is in the Tournament mode. You compete in a number of races and stunt challenges unlocking new tracks and races as you go. The tracks are filled with multiple paths and shortcuts for you to explore. Although it is sometimes a little unclear as to which direction you are supposed to steer your vehicle as you fly through the air.

Multi-player was a blast, but if you expect to come in first you’ll, need to practice and learn the tracks. In most of the races I played in, I would beat the guy behind me by at least 8 to 10 seconds, but lose to the guy in front of me by 10 to 15 seconds. This means that for the most part, all the racers will stretch out on the track. This is a shame because slamming into another rider as you speed through a turn is one of my favorite moments in any racing game. For a game that seems like it was built for smashing into other racers, it is surprisingly tough to take other racers out. Everyone is moving so fast and taking so many different paths that the crashes I was expecting never really seem to occur.

One weird quirk in the game is the respawn system for when you crash. When you crash, you respawn past the next obstacle. This is because the game is so fast and the jumps are so huge that if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to build up enough speed to make most of the jumps. There were times when I jumped several places ahead in a race because I crashed and the game warped me ahead. It wasn’t every time, but it was enough to warrant a mention. The exception was during online matches. When racing online, the respawns seem to take a moment longer, so I always lost ground when I crashed.

I also have to mention the music. It fits the vibe of the game, but the entire soundtrack is composed of very heavy metal filled with men screaming at me. This is the kind of soundtrack designed to piss off your neighbors as you play Xbox Live at 3 in the morning. As someone whose tastes lean towards Colin Hay and the Eels, I was quickly skipping through songs before finally turning the music down at my wife’s request. I am sure that there are some of you out there in Internetland that are into the heavier metals and I’m sure you will love it.

I have to say I was a little surprised that I enjoyed nail’d as much as I did. As I mentioned at the beginning, this is about as far from a realistic racer as you can get. If you are into straight up arcade style racing done fast and well, you really can’t go wrong with nail’d. There was one race where stuff on the track was randomly on fire. Any game that randomly sets things on fire is all right in my book.

This review is based on a copy of the Xbox 360 version of nail’d provided to us by Deep Silver.

Tags: Nail'd, PC, ps3, racing, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.