Revisiting ‘Crash Tag Team Racing’

Crash Bandicoot is a marsupial with many strings to his bow. He’s most famously a platform star, but he’s also been involved with minigames and, as was the rule with 90s mascots, a few karting adventures. Both Crash Team Racing and, to a noticeably lesser extent, Crash Nitro Kart have their fans, and they were fused together in the remastered Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled to the delight of many a bandicoot lover. But what about the black sheep of the racing collection, a bizarre hybrid in the form of 2005’s Crash Tag Team Racing? Here’s a look back at Radical Entertainment’s unique take on the formula.

The game offers a different storyline after two racing games concerned with saving the world from destruction. This time round, we wind up in a theme park called MotorWorld, run by the cyborg Ebenezer von Clutch. The Power Gems that fuel the park have all been stolen, as has the Black Power Gem that keeps von Clutch’s body alive – after Crash, Cortex and friends wind up in the park, von Clutch offers it as a prize to whoever can find the gems. Cortex plots to use it as a base for evil, so Crash tries to stop him.

CTTR is really a game of two halves, and I’m going to focus on the unexpected part of it – the platforming elements. A good chunk of the game sees you play as Crash, and platform around von Clutch’s theme park, interacting with guests and characters and looking for crystals. It’s a hub world of sorts, but there’s a lot to do round here. You’ve previous staples, including smashing crates and collecting Wumpa (this time, in the form of coins rather than fruit), but you can also take on missions, play minigames and buy rewards. A surprising element in the ‘Die-O-Rama’, in which you collect cutscenes of Crash dying in various amusing ways. A bit dark for a kids game, perhaps, but some of them really tickled me.

The racing is surprisingly boring and easy

The game is funny, and although some of it is quite basic humour, I think it lands. As well as the Die-O-Ramas, there are also a lot of great gags and lines as you interact with people around the park, and that’s before Chick and Stew get involved. If you play Nitro-Fueled, you probably already know the commentator pair, but they began here and I liked their quips. This part of the game made me smile a decent amount, with genuinely good jokes, so kudos to the writing team. When I picked it up again, I also immediately remembered the fact that you can make the loading screen make fart and burp noises – not sophisticated, but certainly satisfying.

I’m singing CTTR’s praises a little, but that changes as we get to what is often a backseat element of the racing game – the actual races. If you’re playing the story mode, it’s a good hour and some platforming before you ever put a wheel to the track, a strange design choice – the platforming is essentially sound, but perfunctory because the game knows it should be racing. You can go direct into the racing, of course, but then things feel really bare. Simply put, the racing is surprisingly boring and easy, with uninspired tracks and a focus on cartoon power-ups at the expense of strategy. And that’s before you use the new mechanic.

There’s an emphasis on ‘clashing’, meaning you collide with another kart and fuse together. You have two people – a driver and a player operated a turret to attack their opponents – and it feels like it should add another new dynamic. But it doesn’t. Often, because the AI is sound, it’s easy to let them drive while you man the weapons. With a turret and a selection of overpowered items, it’s hard to be touched – plus, when you de-clash, you appear in front of your ally and receive a speed boost. The balance just isn’t there, and it makes a lot of the wins feels a touch unearned.

The game’s a bit of a mess

You can do more with the cars than just drive them. There’s a selection of other modes, from time trials to deathmatch arenas to even a stunt mode, and depending on your tolerance for the driving mechanics, you may eek some more fun out of them. There’s also a superb bowling minigame, which everyone who has played the game praises, and for good reason. But that’s kind of an issue in itself – when the high points of your big racing game are solid platforming and bowling, and the racing barely factors in, you’ve done something wrong.

The developers are to be applauded for trying something new, as finding a novel angle in a kart racer is ever a challenge. But CTTR often winds up in a master-of-none situation, where the good elements aren’t enough to salvage the weaker ones, and the weaker elements are the ones that should be good. The game’s a bit of a mess, and although there’s definitely fun here, I was underwhelmed as I returned to it. Perhaps it’s apt that a game with a core mechanic of awkwardly fusing different things together is such a bizarre combination itself.