Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled review

Reviewed on: PS4

Review by Samuel R. Auras

Late 90s, early 2000s. Linkin Park and Avril Lavigne are everywhere, some people worried about the millennium bug, and the world was buzzing with anticipation for The Lord of the Rings in theaters. A young boy played video games, mainly Super Nintendo and PlayStation, with his friends, and one game dominated Sunday afternoons like no other: Crash Team Racing. CTR to its friends, the Mario Kart clone (yes, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that) was my favorite game. Mine and my friends’, actually. We competed for the best times in Time Trial mode, and the races and battles in the 4-player multiplayer were endless. Twenty years after CTR’s release, in 2019, the game remains one of the best kart racing games in history. And then, Nitro Fueled arrives.
CTR Nitro Fueled is a deluxe remake of the original game. It brings together absolutely all the content of the first game, and adds double that content on top. Everything that gave CTR its status at the time is present in this remake, including the secret codes: when was the last time you unlocked a character in a game using a cheat code? I no longer remembered, until Nitro Fueled arrived. The game is pure nostalgia, and expectations were sky-high among all fans of the original.

A brief summary of the PS1 CTR from 1999, for those who don’t know it. Crash Team Racing is a kart racing game with characters from the Crash Bandicoot series, in the mold of Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing. The market had no shortage of Mario Kart clones at the time: racing games with Muppets characters, Toy Story, Lego… The options were the most varied. But two things set Crash Team Racing apart from the rest: the spectacular gameplay and the variety of game modes. CTR has a drift and turbo mechanic very different from what is common even today in other games of the genre, a mechanic that rewards mastery of the game. In CTR, the difference between a beginner, an average player and a really good player is crystal clear, and it’s beautiful to see what CTR can do in the hands of someone competent. All of this happening in several game modes that included an Adventure mode, with different objectives on each track, collecting collectibles, unlocking new secret characters, and even a story serving as a backdrop for the whole competition. CTR undoubtedly deserves a 10 for what could be done at the time.
So we arrive in 2019. Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled, developed by Beenox and published by Microsoft, is an excellent bad game. Or a terrible perfect game. Wait, let me explain.
Everything that makes the 1999 CTR a 10 on the PlayStation 1 is here. The mechanics, the characters, the tracks, the game modes, the adventure mode, local multiplayer for up to 4 players. All remade in high definition spectacularly; it is undeniable that CTR NF is a visually GORGEOUS game. Unfortunately, it runs at 30 fps, even on the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, but honestly, that doesn’t get in the way. In hours and hours of play, I suffered no framerate drops, and the game’s performance overall was excellent, except for the loading times, which are somewhat long. The original soundtrack is here too, and you can choose to listen to the original songs from the PlayStation 1 version or the remakes of the Nitro Fueled soundtrack.
Besides all the content of the original game, which in my opinion would already justify the price of $40 or R$180, Beenox went further. All the tracks and all the characters from the PlayStation 2 game, Crash Nitro Kart, are also present, remade to fit CTR’s mechanics. All in all, the game has, at launch, 31 tracks and 26 characters. The tracks are, for the most part, spectacular, with very varied visuals and creative, very fun design; I prefer some tracks over others, but there is absolutely no track among the 31 available that I dislike. From the rainy night of Tiger Temple to the clouds of Hot Air Skyway, there is something for every taste, from simple tracks to more complex ones. All the characters also get dozens of visual options, and you can choose which kart to race in, and modify wheels, colors, paint… All the customization and all the content you expect from a 2019 game is here.
By the way, if there is something expected from a racing game in 2019, it’s the possibility of online races. And, yes, they are present in CTR NF: you can race or battle against friends or against other people using the game’s matchmaking system.
With all this, added to a sense of speed that you don’t find in any other kart racing game, Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled should surely be a 10, right? RIGHT? Well, I thought so too during the first hours of play. But the more I played (and, believe me, I played A LOT since launch two weeks ago, having earned the platinum a few days ago) the more flaws and problems I found. Amateur problems that shouldn’t be present in a game of this size.
Let me make something very clear. If you’re a more casual player, who wants a racing game to play with friends or family, in local multiplayer, or to play alone in adventure mode or local arcade, CTR NF, in my opinion, is a 10. The game’s problems start to become more glaring the more experience with the game you have. The game has a Coin system with which you buy new characters, and you earn these coins exclusively through the game itself; so far, CTR NF has no microtransactions, although the game is published by Activision, which is not usually a good sign in this regard. Anything that was in the original Crash Team Racing can be unlocked normally through adventure mode or local arcade mode, but the new characters and most of the customization options must be bought with these coins. And the rate at which you earn them is quite slow, especially if you play only offline; playing online, you earn a much larger amount.
The tracks, both from Crash Team Racing and Crash Nitro Kart, have been remade in CTR Nitro Fueled. And, although those from the original CTR appear identical in design, there are several differences. The game’s physics isn’t an exact reproduction of the original game, and this changes the kart’s interactions with the track in negative ways: jumps to reach shortcuts are somewhat inconsistent, certain parts of curves on some tracks seem to stick to the kart, making gameplay harder, and the game has some very annoying bugs in this regard, such as one that makes your kart, at times, stop in mid-air during a jump, as if hitting an invisible wall, which completely wipes out your speed. It’s not something that happens all the time, but when it occurs it’s quite frustrating, especially if it occurs on the last lap of a race or a tight time trial. Speaking of bugs, one particularly nasty one that occurs on the PS4 version can corrupt your file, erasing all your adventure mode progress and unlocked characters and cosmetic items; Activision itself has officially recommended that players make a backup from time to time until this is resolved, but after two weeks the problem is still happening.
The game’s biggest problem, however, is also its biggest attraction for most people: online mode. As expected from games of this style, every race is chaos, with bombs, missiles and shields flying back and forth. The problem is that, currently, the items are quite unbalanced, and usually the player who, in the first seconds of the race, gets a bit ahead of the rest of the players will easily keep the lead while the other players hit each other and fall behind. CTR’s version of Mario Kart’s infamous blue shell, an energy ball that chases the first-place player, travels across the map very slowly, and hits any player in the way, which ends up having the opposite effect of what’s expected and helps the first-place player more than it hurts. Besides these balancing problems, the game’s matchmaking is not so good, and commonly puts beginners and veterans together in the same room.
The worst, however, is behind the scenes. Everything points to the game not having dedicated servers, and online multiplayer is done using a P2P system. For those who don’t know the subject, one of the eight players acts as the server for the other seven, and this brings countless problems. Lag, visual bugs, constant disconnections… This system was widely used in old games, from the last decade, and nowadays it’s completely outdated, especially for fast games like shooters or racing games. P2P still works well for turn-based strategy games, for example, but for a racing game with the speed of CTR NF, this system greatly weakens the game’s online. My experience with online multiplayer so far, as much as I love the game, has been equal parts fun and frustration.
All in all, Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is a different game for each audience. If your goal is to play it offline, alone or with friends in local multiplayer, my opinion is that it’s worth every penny. The amount of content in this game is spectacular, the adventure mode is sensational, the mechanics are that classic “easy to learn, hard to master”, and the game will receive support for a long time after launch, with new characters, a new track per month, and new customization options. If you want, however, to get more seriously into online, be prepared to see what happens when a team apparently without experience or without enough resources can do. It’s amateur mistakes in the gears of how the game works that make it a more frustrating experience and take away the shine of the spectacular racing mechanic the game has.
SCORE: 8.5
Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is available for PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. This review was based on the PS4 version, played on a PS4 Pro.