Monster Trucks Nitro Review: Quickly Runs Out of Gas

When it debuted on Macs earlier this year, Monster Trucks Nitro was a fantastic little diversion that took all the fun of Red Lynx’s previous title Trials 2 and brought the difficulty down to a manageable level that anyone could enjoy.  Now only 4 months later, Monster Trucks Nitro has made the transition from the Mac to the iPhone. Don’t jump for joy just yet.  The developers took some risky moves to try and make the game more iPhone-friendly, and while it’s easy to applaud the initiative it’s not so easy to applaud the results.

The concept behind Monster Trucks Nitro remains unchanged from its predecessor.  You’ll need to drive your Monster Truck across a 2.5D landscape, over obstacles and hills, and make it to the finish line in a set amount of time.  In a lot of ways it feels like the spiritual successor to ExciteBike.  In fact, the game that came before Nitro, Trials 2, featured similar gameplay and dirt bikes.  For anyone who loved that NES classic from the days of yore, you’ll find a lot to love in the Red Lynx catalogue.  It’s just a shame Trials 2 hasn’t made the jump from PC to Mac yet like Nitro has.

But what made the Mac version of Nitro so much fun was the physics engine.  Angling your jumps just right to jump the lake, accidentally over-tilting your truck and landing upside down, pulling off stunts like front and back flips — these are the things that made Monster Trucks Nitro such a fun title.  The iPhone version, despite attempting to recreate that same physics experience, seems to be lacking all of that.

In an effort to streamline things the iPhone version now comes with a “cruise control” option that will keep you from varying your speed.  The option becomes essential because you control the nose and tail of your truck using the built-in accelerometer, leaving no free thumb for the throttle. The entire game is built around this concept, and itworks to a certain degree, but it falls short of recreating the fun of the original.  Adding in a left and right command for nose control on the left side of the screen would have gone a long way towards recreating the experience.  Instead you’ll find yourself playing a game that looks like Monster Trucks Nitro, but feels more like using a level in shop class.

Because of the change in controls, a lot of the levels from the original version simply wouldn’t play well on the portable.  Thankfully the team at RedLynx had the forethought to cherry-pick the levels that would work best given the new control scheme.  Despite this, there are a few stages that just prove problematic.  One stage has you completing a loop five times.  To do this you need to spin your iPhone 360 degrees — five times.  Try doing that without making a mess of your headphone wires.  Only 8 stages are included in the iPhone version.  With any reasonable amount of skill you can easily play through everything the game has to offer in a lunch break and still have time to eat that sandwich you packed from home.

Those who haven’t experienced the superior version will likely find this to be an acceptable time waster.  At 99 cents, it gives you a small taste of that classic ExciteBike-style gameplay, even if it only offers a fraction of what you’ll find on the Mac.  If you don’t mind sinking the extra cash though, the Mac version is a vastly superior product (with a free demo available, too!)  If you have any interest in this game, we’d suggest you skip the iPhone version and go straight for the good stuff.  99 cents is enough for a taste, but you’re just not getting enough product here to make it worth a purchase.

Monster Trucks Nitro is available on the iTunes Store for 99 cents.

share permalink ping Leave a Comment