Too easy and too short to warrant paying your hard earned (or even easily earned) money on.

User Rating: 2 | High Voltage Hot Rod Show WII
A game about racing monster trucks with speed boosts and jumps for about 10 bucks sounds great. Unfortunately, somewhere between conception and creation, laziness took hold and an idea with some potential falls short of being worthwhile.

The gameplay is actually the best part of this game, and is somewhat entertaining. This, however, only lasts a few races, after which the repetitiveness really starts to hamper the fun. Its a simple top down arcade type racer, with jumps from which you can trick off and boost arrows, to charge your boost meter which is automatically discharged whenever your on the ground. You can also perform hops to avoid either obstacles, or even certain jumps in order to hit the bigger ones behind them.

It becomes clear quickly that to win you will need to perfect performing as many jumps as possible in air without botching the landing, lest you lose your momentum. By the time you breeze through the easy difficulty on the single player campaign, you'll be comfortable with the control and feel of the vehicles. The medium and hard difficulties get incrementally harder, but as there are only six courses total, it won't take much more than an hour to master the single player campaign.

The courses are pretty bland, with slightly differing backgrounds, many twists and turns and a few obstacles to avoid. All are fairly easy to memorize and nail the right jumps for the most boost to help get the best times, which if performed in time trials can be posted on online leaderboards. This might add a few hours of enjoyment to some, trying to post the best time, or improve their spot on the list, but isn't enough to save the game of its shortcomings.

The multiplayer mode will offer some limited fun, but only if all players are approximately the same skill level, as there are no items or handicap system in place to even out the playing field. There is also no "rubber banding" at play here, which is both elating (You'll know the hassle it can be if you've ever had a big lead in something like Mario Kart, only to be hit by a cursed blue shell mere feet from the finish line and end up in the bottom half of an online ranked match) and frustrating. The best racer, barring any major mistakes, will always win. This makes it pretty boring for anyone with differing skill levels.

The trucks featured really play no part in the general gameplay. There is no difference between any of them, and other than a prerace pan, you never really see much of them during the race other than their roofs. The graphics are alright, especially for a wiiware game, but the soundtrack is atrocious. The race music is more painful to listen to than having to drive nails into your kneecaps, and will get under your skin before you clear the medium difficulty. And, unless you really enjoy stereotypical redneck sound effects, the rest of the game's sounds aren't much more enjoyable.

Conclusion

Interesting, if somewhat shallow, gameplay mechanics coupled with numerous control options and online leaderboards don't make up for its shortcomings. It is simply too short and too easy to even allot any Wii memory blocks to, far less pay 10 dollars for.