Review for Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. Game for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 21/06/2019
Many friendships were born thanks to the titles of the glorious PlayStation era, but just as many have begun to falter for the same reason. For years and years Crash Team Racing has held the ground as one of the most popular racing games ever, enough to ride the wave of success much longer than its successor Crash Nitro Kart. Who does not have well imprinted in mind the endless fights with their friends, side by side, with a gray joypad in hand, ready to hit each other with missiles and bombs? Those born between the 80s and 90s have certainly experienced such moments but the remake created by Beenox and Vicarious Visions certainly does not target them only. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled was born as an ambitious remake, so much so that it contains all the tracks designed to date and re-proposes the glorious past on the road of Crash Bandicoot & Co. in a modern sauce.
Run boy, run!
The first modality with which we ventured is obviously that adventure: freeing the world from the threat of Nitros Oxide is in fact essential to be able to unlock most of the characters, in addition to the fact that it represents an excellent starting point both to immediately expand the pilot park and to (re) become familiar with the mechanics of the game. Right from the start you notice that the physics and dynamics of the karts have been slightly modified, making some drivers much heavier than their thinner colleagues: jumping to take a shortcut with Tiny Tiger or Crunch will not be like taking it in the role of Crash or Penta Penguin. Obviously the basic characteristics of the pilots have been kept as they were in the original work. There will be characters more inclined to turn and penalized on acceleration and vice versa, as well as more balanced ones like Crash Bandicoot. In short, in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled the basic mechanics of the original title have been maintained in an excellent way but with some more foresight, modernizing and balancing the game.
One of the few flaws we have noticed is that the size of some riders can negatively affect the race, not so much for the "weight" issue that we mentioned a few lines ago but more for the visual: it will happen several times that some beakers or some boxes of Nitro / TNT will be hidden by the fairly imposing silhouettes of the pilots themselves, making you fall into the trap set by your opponents much more easily. It is not something that cannot be remedied: once you have run a lot of races you get used to it but of course the impression is that this is a detail that deserved more attention.
Obstacles are not crossed, they are destroyed ... with a missile
If you face the various game modes, including Adventure, with a spirit of non-completists, the level of challenge will not be insurmountable at all, indeed with a little experience you will be able to easily bring home the result. However, if you have the courage to raise the challenge level, setting it to hard, or engage in feats such as obtaining the platinum level of the relics, collecting CTR tokens or beating the times of N. Trophy, be prepared to suffer. You will have to earn every single milestone to the sound of shortcuts, cut curves, superdrips exploited to the last hundredth of a second and weapons used in a very wise and cunning way.
Both the turbo deriving from the jumps and the curves - and why not also the straights where you can give vent to the super-skidding - will be essential to take down the opponents in the lap times. However, these will certainly be distorted when the competition moves online: in multiplayer there is no preset challenge level, there is no mercy or mercy for anyone: here either you run fast like the proverbial gazelle against the lion, escaping the heap to earn the head of the competition, or you end up in a real war on slaughter.
In the online competition there will be races in which a leading group will be created, with some nice gaps between them, and instead a bunch that will start more or less from the fourth to the eighth position, where the most absolute delirium will reign. Only the toughest and most determined will be able to get out of this tumult to try to at least aspire to the podium, and when this happens you can not help but feel enormously satisfied, even if you do not reach victory. It can be said with certainty that it is in the multiplayer mode that the real fun of Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled lies. Being able to fight and maintain a clean driving style between missile trips, rolling bombs, crates of nitro and so on and so forth, competing with the other players: this is where the true essence of the title lies.
A brand new old world
Even before the gameplay, even before the bitter struggles for the first place, what is surprising about Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is certainly the graphics sector. Retracing Via Aria Calda, launching into the shortcuts of Piramide Papu, going to the tablet on the straights of the Castle of Neo Cortex has never been so beautiful. The shape of the slopes has remained as it is, including shortcuts, but everything has been renewed and animated in keeping with the times. The result is amazing: from the softness of Polar's face to the armor of N. Trophy. The drivers and circuits are alive, dynamic and animated enough to make us want, at times, to stop to admire some glimpses of the track better, getting lost in the care lavished even in the small details and in the richness of textures. Obviously, this effect does not only appear in the soul of the nostalgic player but also for those who approach Crash Team Racing for the first time.
To enrich everything there is the Pit Stop: this is the name with which the in-game store has been baptized with which we can both unlock the Nitro Kart characters and a myriad of decals, frames, colors and wheels for our karts as well as various skins for all characters. The combinations are many and you will have a hard time finding your favorite assets for pilots. All this can be bought with Wumpa tokens, an in-game currency that will be obtained at the end of each race.
The sound sector is also fantastic, both for the presence of the original songs rearranged and remixed and for the dubbing, entirely in Spanish, which will give us several pearls especially for the provocations that the pilots shout at each other during the races.
Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is the perfect meeting point between Team Racing and Nitro Kart. The remake, although it does not include the adventure of the second chapter but "only" the tracks and the drivers, still manages to give pure and healthy hours of fun, both in single player mode and above all in multiplayer. It is precisely here that Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled gives the best of itself, in the real competition with friends: on the other hand, what's better than throwing yourself into a race full of hatches, rolling bombs and missiles up to last corner?
► Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is a racing type game developed by Vicarious Visions and published by Activision for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 21/06/2019
