Review by: Tom Chick

Nail’d doesn’t feel like a game so much as something someone did with a graphics engine. The developers at Techland have been plugging away at shooters for a while, using their Chrome engine to varying effect, ranging from the forgettable (Chrome) to the overlooked (Call of Juarez). With Nail’d, it feels like they took a few weeks to slap a racing game onto their Chrome engine.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! It’s a good engine, and it serves the pace of Nail’d quite well. Besides, you don’t need a lot to make a serviceable racing game: speed, scenery, some sort of campaign progression, and -- voila! Racing game! Now just think of a flashy name. Barring that, replace a vowel with an apostrophe.

Nail’d certainly gets the speed and scenery right. Fast and pretty is half the battle for this sort of throwaway racing game. The Chrome engine does its job, squeezing the visuals into a fisheye lens effect to show you as much as it can. This fish’s eye view deftly presents four locations threaded with moderately outrageous courses. It’s similar to Sony’s Motorstorm series in that you’re racing through the same area, but along a variety of courses, often with multiple paths. Crazy altitudes and low stakes are the order of the day, similar to the SSX series. You’re constantly ramping into what feels like a crazy low-G, high-altitude leaps, festooned with hot air balloons to drive home the point that you’re really high. If I had a nickel for every time I drove my ATV into a hot air balloon in Nail’d, I’d be able to buy a real ATV, a real hot air balloon, and the insurance coverage for crashing them into each other. Nail’d even flirts with driving into a jet airliner, but chickens out.

You’ll crash occasionally, but Nail’d doesn’t want you to sweat it. To give you a sense for the game’s failure-averse philosophy, crashing actually respawns you ahead of whatever you crashed into. “Hey, don’t worry about that jump or obstacle, kiddo!” it seems to say. “Let’s just skip that part, shall we? Here’s where you would have been if you hadn’t crashed.”