Cheap Thrills would be a better name for this outstandingly embarrassing racer.
(-) terrible turning controls; depressingly low production values; the entire game feels too plain; even if the controls actually worked the game is still lifeless and boring
Product placement in this country is a dangerous deed. Many developers create things and sell them to the public with no intention instead to endorse their already successful product with a not-so-good decoy with the product's license. You'll see that with, in fact, many games that were developed by DSI Games, because they were the ones who gave us the privilege of playing the nearly empty and hopeless M&M's Kart Racing. It's hard for us to distinguish these games between the lines of something to make an entrepreneur more bucks or actually a decent game in it's own right.
And with the DSI Games effort Jeep Thrills, the company is attempting to rip off unexpected people of a different audience, ones who have a proud enthusiasm for the Jeep. Any proud owner of a Jeep could take this game home with the safe bet that this would be an excellent tribute to their most cherished automobile, but as they begin to play their loyalties are going to be eternally damaged and they will suffer the disservice that their favorite automobile company allowed them to suffer from this fate. Putting it short, Jeep Thrills is a misleading name because nothing about this game will thrill you by any stretch of the definition.
The back of the cover explains that Jeep Thrills, what they refer to as "the undisputed King of off road adventure", is an offroad racer that takes people behind the wheels of 20 different colored Jeeps and 36 different outdoor tracks. But the fact is, most of the Jeeps operate and handle the same way, and the tracks blend together. And very few of them are unlocked from the start, and if you assign yourself the duty to uncover them all, you're going to bend your hair back tight enough to scalp yourself in your living.
Your basic career mode has you take part in a series of races, and to advance to the next one you need to place third or better. But good luck doing that, because the minute you start racing your heart is going to sink deep in your chest. The car handling is awful. The game uses only the Wii-remote by itself, and it is very slow in registering your turning to your Jeep. And the tracks demand sharp turns at high speeds, so it's likely you're going to crash toward every single turn. I've had races where I bumped up next to other computer controlled cars to try and take a sharp turn, using them as a decoy for the nightmare that is the car's physics. Of course like most Wii racing titles, the game also supports the Wii Wheel, but that little piece of plastic won't make the game the slightest bit easier. In fact it makes it even harder, because you have to work more muscles to take the ridiculously sharp turns and the turning sensitivity won't be helped whatsoever along the way. The game really could have benefited from support for the nun-chuck, because even though the car handling would still be off key, the un-bear-ability would be decreased immensely and people who really pushed themselves to enjoy the game might actually succeed in their morbid and unrealistic desires.
Jeep Thrills clearly doesn't control well, and the production values match with the quality of the controls admirably. Details pop in the environment as you pick up your slow, slow sense of speed, which is the result of a bad draw distance. The car models themselves look decent but the tracks look very basic, and have a similar pattern with one another even if they are entirely different. The frame rate drags by as well, which doesn't actually bring the game down much further but judging from how simplistic everything looks and feels the game should be able to hold a steady frame rate, but for some reason it doesn't.
The racing engine, if you assumed that the controls and the graphics were both acceptable, still feels a little too plain. The menus you look through are pretty standard and the music can drone you after a while, and the gameplay itself feels much plainer than even the front title screen. The track design has been pretty thrown together, the turns looking pretty genuine like they were re-used and re-used to death in other games, but of course the broken motion controls will make them difficult. There is also a boost system implemented in your car, but you have to drift to gain power which as you imagine is a chore, and if you activate the boost then your car will increase speed and be close to impossible to control, resulting in your umpteenth crash. The artificial intelligence for the racers is incredibly stupid, driving against the walls as if they too are suffering from the Wii remote's flawed motion sensing, but still they trudge ahead of you like the track is nothing. More than anything this will insult the player, because if you make one crash when you happen to take the lead, then even if you consider the boosts, there will be close to no chance for you to recover your spots. This means at every difficult turn, you'll probably slow down to maintain control, but still the other racers will pass you anyway because you're going too slow. The in-track shortcuts don't make much of a difference either, feeling more like alternative routes than something you can use to gain a place or two.
Jeep Thrills is a perfect example for using a product to create a scam of a crappy video game to gain quick cash. The controls are on the brink of broken, and even if it supported a better control method, it would still fall well short of other racers on the Wii like Need For Speed and Mario Kart. The only use I could see for this game is simulating a drunk driver to educate people not to drink and drive, since the handling is pretty much that. But as a playable game, leave this piece of shovel-wear at the store, and if someone else tries to pick it up and head for the counter, rip it out of their hands, put it back, and say "You'll thank me later."