The game’s low difficulty and length combine to prevent, World Circuit from reaching its full potential.
World Circuit controls almost identically to Nintendo’s Wii racer Excite Truck. The only difference is the small trick system that is easy to learn but fairly hard to master. World Circuit comes with a nice mini steering wheel which you can put the Wii remote in to get slightly more precise steering. Obviously you turn by using the steering wheel like you would a normal steering wheel. However if you make a looping motion with the steering wheel after going off a jump you can perform flips and other tricks. World Circuit’s main game mode is the World Circuit mode which consists of a twenty week schedule with one race a week making a total of twenty races. However after a while you start seeing different versions of the same tracks and your opponents never get any harder. The leaderboard in the World Circuit mode is based off of points. You get a certain amount of points depending on where you finish in the race but if you can manage to get second place or up on most of the races you’ll easily finish in first place. The World Circuit mode only has one real downside which is the super short length. You can easily finish all twenty races in two hours or less and all of the races are very easy.
Luckily a good amount of the courses in the game are cool so it will take a few races to get bored of each track. You can play through all of the available tracks with the quick play mode. It’s smarter to wait to use this mode until you’ve unlocked all of the tracks. You can also unlock mirrored versions of all the tracks although at times it’s hard to see any noticeable difference.
There is also a selection of random mini-games that fit well with the games wacky theme. However the mini-games aren’t that much fun. The different cars you get throughout the course of the game are all pretty cool. You get your basic monster truck cars but there are also a bunch of random cars with big wheels added on. For instance you can drive things such as school buses, fire trucks, and ambulances.
You can also upgrade your cars thanks to a sort of RPG like level up system. During races performing tricks, wrecking cars, destroying barrels, and doing some other stuff earns you points. At the end of each race your points total is added up and if you have a certain amount you get an experience point. You can then go into your garage and choose to update a car’s stats. These stats vary from things such as speed, turning, acceleration, and many more. However as handy as this feature the way they chose to do it isn’t the best way they could’ve done it.
Monster 4X4 World Circuit does an okay job of presenting itself. The games menus all have scenes of monster truck destruction going on in the background but during the actual game you won’t find anything really to close to those movies. Graphically the game looks more like an average Gamecube game. All of the environments look okay but they are rather boring. All of the cars look okay none of them are too blocky. All around the graphics aren’t terrible but they are far from being great.
The sound in Monster 4X4 World Circuit is okay. The game features a nice soundtrack but some of the songs are just plain boring and some are annoying. The sound effects are very disappointing for a monster truck game. There are no awesome sounding explosions like you would expect from a game like this and the other random sound effects are fairly lame.
Value wise Monster 4X4 World Circuit’s main mode the World Circuit mode can easily be completed in about two hours. However there is some replay value thanks to the quick play mode where you can easily try out other cars and replay your favorite courses. There are also mirrored versions of all of the game’s tracks which provide a slightly different take on the same courses.
All in all Monster 4X4 World Circuit is an underappreciated racing game. It may not be true monster truck racing, it may be super easy, and it may be slightly over-priced but for those looking for another good Wii racing game after they beat Excite Truck I suggest trying to find a used copy of this game or at least renting it you may be surprised.
~LOZFAN6537