While it might come as a surprise to most people, monster trucks are still a thing. Most surprising of all is that a game came out recently about them. However, it is not about crushing cars but rather racing them. Big Foot: Collision Course is probably one of the worst examples of what a company can do when they acquire the rights to make a licensed game. The graphics are terrible, the controls pretty much do what they want, and the music is annoying and grating.
The most notable mistake of Big Foot is that it uses the Wii controller’s sensor alone to control the monster trucks. While other Nintendo made games have done this right in the past the results here end up being disastrous. If the controller is turned too far, say for a sharp corner, the vehicle simply goes straight. It would be fine if this was the exception to the rule, but most of the time the trucks in the game don’t like to be steered at all.
The steering would be bad enough if it wasn’t for the terrible, terrible graphics. It isn’t uncommon for Wii games to have old and dated graphics, Big Foot takes advantage of that stereotype and looks like a Playstation 1 launch title. The trucks aren’t terribly detailed, the ground that is raced on is bland and could have been part of any other generic racing game, and it isn’t uncommon to see the background rip apart at its seams during racing.
This isn’t to say that everything in the game is terrible, just most things. The game does a very good job of having a large number of unlockables that are awarded after every race, making it almost worthwhile to continue to playing to see what is next. This is of course counteracted by the fact that the game seems to actively want the player to stop interacting with it in anyway.
The interface of the game leaves much to be desired, as there are several bars on the side that are rather ill defined as to what they do. One of them is the boost, that makes the truck speed up to the point of being entirely uncontrollable, and the other two are supposed to show the condition of the vehicle. The problem with the latter two is that they overlap making them entirely impossible to read. Problems start to arise in longer races when the condition of the truck starts to affect the race, but sadly it is hard to decide when that moment is, other than when other trucks start flying by.
With everything that goes wrong with Big Foot, it is sad to see that it wasn’t able to pull any one thing together long enough to really make a difference. Most of the errors and massive faults with the game are clear from the moment that it is turned on, so there isn’t really any excusing them. For people who are looking for this particular niche of gaming there really isn’t much. That said this one should still be avoided for any reason besides a few sad laughs at someone else’s expense.
