Not quite a wild time

ATV Wild Ride 3D brings the racing genre to the 3DS eShop. It brings us back to a simpler time, when racing was just about racing, without all the bells, whistles, super charged items, and crazy unlocks.

With full online play support, extended and mirror options for tracks, and online leaderboards, there's a lot on offer here content wise.

When it comes to substance though, it's unfortunately lacking.

ATV Wild Ride 3D (3DS eShop)
Developer: Renegade Kid
Publisher: Renegade Kid
Release: March 7, 2013
MSRP: $7.99

Straight and to the point, ATV Wild Ride 3D allows you to, well, race ATVs across a number of courses and gametypes. There's a world tour campaign, as well as quick race, freestyle, time trial, and online and local play options.

Everything is just how it sounds. The campaign will allow you to race sequential courses as you progress through more difficult races, and freestyle is a gametype that measures trick points rather than speed.

You can customize the amount of laps you want, as well as AI opponents, and an optional "elimination" setting that boots the lowest place racer each lap.

Visually, the game is fairly unimpressive, and the 3D effects are fairly minimal, to the point where you may not even notice them at times. The level design is all over the spectrum in terms of quality, with some stages having a unique, obvious imprint, and others feeling a bit more generic.

Like the Cruisin' USA and World racing games of old, I wish the different regions in the game were a bit more pronounced, and perhaps even over the top -- it would have suited Renegade Kid's style a bit more.

You can see a tiny bit of Renegade Kid's imprint in the game (if you look hard you'll even see a little Mutant Mudds and Bomb Monkey Easter egg), but from a pure racing perspective, there isn't much heart here.

In addition to trying for first place, you're going to want to also pull some tricks from time to time. There's two layers with the trick system -- pre-loading, and trick type. As you start to hit a jump, you can hold up or down to pre-load a certain type of move.

Then, by using the L, R, or L+R buttons, you can launch a short, medium, or long tricks respectively. The system is hard to get used to, but once you've practiced a bit, you should be able to judge distances properly and pre-loading will come naturally.

Online play works exactly as advertised. All you have to do is boot up the mode, jump in some lobbies, and race! With a distinct lack of online games on the 3DS eShop, this addition was refreshing, and should help elongate some of the repetition found in the single player portion.

For those of you who have friends with a 3DS close by, there's also a local play option. You have to commend Renegade Kid for adding what should be a staple feature in most multiplayer eShop games.

If you're looking to get more out of the game, all of ATV 3D's six stages have an extended track and a mirror version, which brings the stage count to 24 variations. But after you've tackled the extended tracks, everything starts to blend together. The racers all feel the same, a few of the tracks look the same, and all of the tricks function in the same manner.

In many ways, ATV Wild Ride 3D is stuck in the 90s, but that isn't wholly a bad thing. It does everything that it advertises -- it allows you to ride ATV vehicles on some pretty neat courses, in 3D.

Just don't expect much more than that.

THE VERDICT

ATV Wild Ride 3D Timeline