TL;DR – Nail’d is a cheesy, high-octane 7th generation racing game with an emphasis on off-road ATV chaos that is great fun for around 3 or so hours. Unfortunately, the game itself is closer to 10 hours for those seeking to clear the single player “campaign” and those of you looking for an online title are out of luck entirely as the servers are down. As such I’d highly recommend this game to those of you who are able to leave sleeping dogs lie, but would advise against buying it if you’re the type of person who wants to see their games through to the end.
Nail’d is a 7th generation racing game brought into the world by Techland (of Call of Juarez and Dead Island fame), which came to my attention due to a combination of three significant factors. The first was that it was aggressively cheap with a sale price of around $1, the second was that it promised an earnestly unironic and heartfelt attempt to deliver a relentlessly energic racing game based around EXTREME off-roading action, and the third factor was that it somehow maintained a very positive average review rating on Steam. It’s definitely an obscure choice for a review considering the fact that it came and went without leaving much of an impact or fanbase behind, but I’m a sucker for bargain bin games from this era and honestly the fact that they managed to persuade Slipknot to put their music in the OST spoke volumes. Sadly they were only able to get 1 Slipknot song and one Rage Against the Machine Song, which I feel is honestly emblematic of how the entire game panned out. You see, the game itself is enjoyable but it definitely feels as though development time (or budget) ran out midway through the project and as such Techland panicked and desperately tried to pad out the game so that they could punt it onto the market as a fully priced AAA game.
Now that’s not to say that Nail’d doesn’t have it’s areas of refinement and effort, as the tracks you race on are generally pretty good and both the racing AI and soundtrack are par for the course with some nice touches. The tracks themselves fit into 3 broad clusters, each with equal-ish amounts of courses and they include off-road American desert tracks, off-road Andes mountains/woodland forest tracks and finally Mediterranean Grecian ruin tracks. Each group has it’s own biome and lighting and each track has it’s own hazards and moving parts, generally designed to make traversing them chaotic and to provide racers with ways to bash into each other and force their opponents to crash. The game also places a surprisingly large emphasis on aerial jumps, with most courses being absolutely ridden with ramps, jumps and hair-raising falls. To it’s credit, these jumps are often spectacular and are often just the right amount of challenging, requiring a bit of knowledge or skill to traverse successfully lest you smash into the side of a cliff or spend far too long airborne while your competition speeds off into the sunset. To keep these tracks and the ensuing races interesting, Nail’d also provides you with a Nitros boost ability which passively regenerates and which can also be increased quickly via performing one of a series of “Feats”. These include performing wheelies, causing other players to crash, nailing a perfect landing or driving through flaming circles / checkpoints. While these may sound like a silly little side activity, most of the tracks are built with them in mind and learning how to master them will give you a significant edge thanks to the nitros boost that they provide.
As for the AI, it’s often in the goldilocks spot of providing an acceptable challenge without being too perfect and has a surprising habit of making mistakes while the player isn’t looking. For most racing games you’re safe to assume that the AI is frankly cheating when they’re off screen, as they’re often immune to course hazards at best or actively gaining speed boosts via the tedious “rubber banding” effect at worst. Yet in Nail’d the AI can and will make an absolute mess of things while they’re far in the lead or eating your dust in the rear-view mirror, which gives the races and especially the tournament cups a much needed dose of unpredictability. Opponents that were placed 1st in the last race will suddenly drop down to 6th without any input from the player, or vice-versa which prevents the feeling that a cup has already been decided only a race or two in. There are one or two quirks to the AI though, such as the fact that it definitely has a pre-determined racing line (which is common to the genre) that it will follow even when it’s a really, really bad idea. You can also cause it to commit suicide at multiple points, as the AI will boost when you’re boosting near it but there are some jumps that it just doesn’t know how to handle while boosting and as such you can force it to over commit 100% of the time. Finally as for the soundtrack, it adds an air of cheesy metal rock which is era appropriate and that features some original pieces which serve to fill in the gaps between the bands that you might have heard of. While you’re not going to rush out and buy the Nail’d OST, the tracks all fit the game well and help push the game’s overall atmosphere of unabashed high-octane thrill seeking with an edge of the EXTREME
Alas this EXTREME feeling is hard to sustain in any game, and as mentioned above Nail’d has the definite air of a game that ran out of something during it’s development. While the OST is great (at least within the context of the game), it is relatively skimpy and will loop frequently even before you’ve raced all of the tracks that the game has to offer. And even though those tracks are almost all good (one or two feel like they were designed by malicious designers who want to see you crash and revel in your frustration) there just aren’t enough of them to sustain the game. For context the campaign is split into a series of events, starting with a tutorial and then gently easing you into a series of “tournaments” that each feature multiple events that correspond to a race or maybe two that have the same rules. This section of Nail’d is great fun as you’re constantly encountering new tracks and learning their tricks, but then it abruptly ends around the 3 hour mark and you’re then asked to complete multiple of the aforementioned courses per event with multiple events per cup. If you’re like me you’ll initially assume this is a heightening of the stakes and a way to introduce the cup mechanic, wherein winning one race isn’t enough and now you need to prove your mettle against the same racers in multiple races at a time.
Alas the majority of the game takes this format, as you’ll have done every course before you’re even halfway through and then burned through the “mutators” in no time. These mutators are ways in which the game influences the courses so as to spice things up and introduce new goals, but there aren’t many of them and most of them are fairly rudimentary. You’ve got “no collision” mode, which disables collisions with other drivers, a max boost mode which means your nitros boost is always full, a “stunt” mode wherein the “feats” mentioned earlier add to your score with the highest score winning and finally a time attack mode where a timer is ticking down and you need to race through the checkpoints in time. In other words the mutators are go fast because no one can hit you, go fast because you have infinite boost, perform feats or lose and go fast against no opponents or lose. I’d be fatuitous if I said they didn’t change how the game feels, but when you’re doing the same course multiple times per tournament and there are multiple tournaments with those same courses it does start to feel extremely repetitive. All the higher difficulties do is increase the number of courses per event, culminating in the GRAND FINALE where you do 8 courses back-to-back. The same 8 courses you’ve been racing since the campaign started…
And honestly that’s about it, as the game has very little else to offer once you’ve cleared through the initial wave of tracks and played through the handful of mutators that are on offer. There is also a time trial mode which involves, err, racing on the same tracks against the developer times but that’s basically the same thing as the time trial mutator mode you’ve already played through in the campaign (albeit harder). There was a multiplayer mode for this game, but as stated the game came and went without causing much of a fuss and as such the game died years ago and even if you still found people who cared it’s too late as the servers are down. I suppose there is a modest customisation aspect to mention as you can choose different parts and liveries for the vehicle of your choice, but honestly these parts don’t change much and I was able to breeze through the entire game with the stock setup as the parts have a modest impact at best. You can increase handling in exchange for acceleration/boost, or vice-versa and that’s about it. The game does differentiate between ground and air handling, but really it’s all very minor stuff and I didn’t notice much of a difference to how my vehicle controlled even after I picked all of the +boost -handling parts.
In conclusion Nail’d is a fun little racing game that spreads itself too thin in the pursuit of the AAA price tag. Had it been released as a humble XBLA game, or a budget release then it would have been commendable and a fine example of a racing game that makes due with a modest amount of courses and a short soundtrack. The boost feats are fun to go for, the courses themselves are largely enjoyable and the AI is surprisingly honest for a racing game. Yet sadly this was not a budget title and was instead an example of an overly ambitious developer attempting to compete with the big boys, an attempt that leads to an unflattering conclusion. Nail’d is a decent game but one that quickly wears out it’s welcome and which needlessly prolongs it’s presence in the vain hope that you’ll consider it a worthy competitor to the bigger games of the era such as Motorstorm and Need for Speed (hell even Fuel has more content). Instead it merely highlights it’s own insecurities by forcing you to beat the same courses a dozen times each before dumping it’s half-assed ending onto you. Which I will unceremoniously share below (look away spoilers haters!)
