Nail'd

Nail'd is a scrappy little thing, eager to instil a Burnout circa-early 00s vibe by emulating its style and brashness. The gameplay is comfortably shallow, the music loud.

In a world where even the most arcade of racers are bending over for realism to try and secure more sales, Nail'd, with its one hundred foot drops and leisurely leaps into the realm of the stupid every lap is actually really rather refreshing to behold. That the game doesn't bolt elaborate stunts onto each jump, or have a cheap and nasty variant of EA's DJ Atomika is a point in its favour.

If you took a pot shot at what this ATV/MX racer offered, you'd be pretty damn close to the truth. Career mode careens down a slope filled with races, points-based challenges and the like, while single events and custom tournaments let you play as you please. For a game that paints its excessiveness on mile-high walls, the options are pretty mundane.

Where it plays its aces is on the track. Every stage in Nail'd is spaghetti spewed over mountain ranges that have seen their fair share of tectonic action in their time. Multiple pathways are the norm, climbing you up shear cliff faces and off into the blue sky, until you plunge down to below sea level, front wheel first, having to dodge stone arches and trees as you go. There's a little whiff of classic SSX in catching so much air.

Nail'd flirts with an interesting little visual trick, a camera angle that leans heavily towards fish-eye with each successive jump. It makes every fall into the depths of canyons all the more ludicrous and enjoyable. You can picture Konam's Tak Fuji whispering "extreme!" as you take your mountain plunge.

Perhaps a byproduct of that trick however means your ATV racer looking as squashed as a bug on a windshield. The game wins no awards on graphical horsepower, but by god does it brazenly get away with throwing every other goddamn thing you can think of encountering on a race track. Then some more besides, defying gravity every mile of the way.

Racetracks veer from vertical cliffs to along dam walls with 90 degree angles. Over partially-built bridges and into train tunnels, sniffing Crazy Taxi's exhaust fumes with last-second locomotive dodges and dodging construction cranes with mid-air twists and judicious application of boost.

There's even some bizarre Bermuda triangle crash site stage, as you race along and through twisted plane wrecks as other commerical airliners nearly tumbling out of the sky overhead. We haven't seen this level of craziness since the Midway arcade racers of the late 90s.

If anything, Nail'd overindulges in trying to grab your attention, each track overlong until successive set-pieces gradually numb you to the next. On our first run through we thought us close to the end of the race, only for a quick glance scoreboard ways to reveal we're only halfway through. It's a bad sign for an experience that supposed to be grabbing your adrenaline by the balls and twanging them like elastic bands.

And given that the tracks twist and turn with such aggressiveness, you'd wish for at least a touch of drift to give you the illusion of strategy, or success in feathering round a near drop with a DDR-style tapping of brake and accelerator. Not for Nail'd, oh no.

The only time we took our finger off the accelerator and boost button was when we were ready to head-butt a wall. Even then it was but a quick violent yank in collaboration with a nasty tug of the joystick to change direction, and it was back to full pelt down the clogged dusty roads.

Even when you do stack it (you try landing on a landfill digger face first and see what happens) the game occasionally shunts you several positions ahead of where you were. Who needs blue shells when you've got omnipotent AI with Alzheimer's? Couple that with NPC racers that are just happy to be there rather than channeling that need for speed and needless to say, trying to get to first place is as hard as blinking.

Nail'd is a game of thrills, its flamboyant nature such that it reminds you of that ex you dated early in life. The one you knew was bad for you and horribly shallow and ultimately fulfilled little of your long term needs, but was a lot of fun for brief interludes. You're in a better place now, more mature in your ways, but occasionally you have that guilty reminisce and smile at the memory.

Shame is, the memory's free, and Nail'd is asking a penny shy of thirty quid of your time. It'd be a great gift for younger gamers who don't inspect their wares quite as intently as we do, and are just happy to whoop at the big jumps, nod along to the thumping soundtrack , and piss about with the points-scoring events.

And - secretly - you can't help but envy them.