Nail'd PC Performance & Screenshots

Nail'd is the new ATV arcade racing from Techland. We were quite impressed with it, given the fact that Techland doesn't have any experience in this genre. Forget about everything, this is an arcade racing with loose physics and speed. Seriously, Nail'd is the fastest game we've ever played with some insane jumps and amazing tracks. Kudos to Techland for trying something different.

However, Nail'd is cursed by the same damn game mechanics that haunt every arcade racing game. We're talking about the CPU cheats. We were shocked when we played half of the game and didn't encounter any CPU cheating. But alas, at the 3/4 of the campaign, all the 'familiar' CPU cheats come to surface. Opponents are almost invicible, points aren't given even when slamming your opponents or when you push them to brake down their bikes, rubber banding is kicking in and they'll always catch up with you and their touchdowns are flawless. Funny thing is that even when the leader is in front of you and doesn't take the shortcuts to gain points from passing through gates or circles, he'll keep getting points for unknown reasons. It's really sad, because the first half of the game (which doesn't have those 'features') is highly enjoyable.

As with Call Of Juarez: Bound In Blood, Nail'd uses Chrome 4 engine and the end result is quite astonishing. Great shading effects, highly detailed environments and nice lighting are the main things you'll notice. There are soft particles, high polygon bikes and a cute blur filter. Our only complaints are regarding the limited LOD and some low-resolution rock textures. Chrome 4 doesn't support MSAA. Instead it uses an alternative technique that is not demanding but hides a lot of jaggies. This is a really fast game, which means that you'll need a high framerate to appreciate it. Thankfully, Chrome 4 won't stress your PC. As always, we used a Q9650 @ 4.2Ghz, 4GB DDR2 and a GTX295. Nvidia has already an SLI profile for it and the scaling is great. The game uses all four cores of a quadcore CPU, although it doesn't take full advantage of them. When simulating a dualcore CPU, we witnessed a higher CPU usage and didn't notice any framerate loss. Our framerate was averaging around 90-130 with maxed details at 1920x1080.

Nail'd could have been one of the best arcade racings of 2010. We can overlook the incosistent physics and the fact that the stages are repeated quite often. But we can't overlook those cheap CPU 'cheats'. It's time for developers to start coding proper AI's instead of using cheap tricks. And it's really sad to experience this kind of things in 2010. Enjoy the following screenshots!