/games/ - Games

🎶 Cruuuuuuuwuuisan DAS RITE come mong go cruisaaaaaaan AWYEAH Lesbo Cruuuuuuisan 🎶

Cruis'n Blast for Nintendo Switch is colorful fast food. First time you race a course feels like your life turning into an amazing action movie. Second time you race the same course is also movie-like, but in a bad way. You suspect that explosions and stuff are rigidly scripted to coincide exactly with where the player is. In time trial you can slow down and see how the game falls apart: Animals slow down just like you, rockets and even falling rocks idle in the air.

Worst of all is how rarely collision detection happens. No experienced gamer expects the collision geometry to be as complex as what you see, especially in a racer that doesn't present itself as a very serious affair, but here the amount of things you just pass through almost touches the negative record for a game made this century (still your the winner, Big Rigs). Massive monsters and explosions can't ever hurt you as human-controlled cars take no damage from anything, which is a tolerable design choice for a 90s style arcade racer IMHO, but you don't even slow down and just clip through. Most of the chaos is just purely optical. Do you like the squid item in Mario Kart that does nothing but obstruct your view a bit? Would you love a racer to throw many variations of the squid idea at you? Well that's what you get here with the rockets & and explosions & dinos & UFOs and nothing else. 30 years before this Switch game F-Zero on the SNES had tracks with wind coming from the side you had to steer against, in Cruis'n Blast you have a storm or torrent of water crossing the track and there is no effect whatsoever on the steering.

You play a course for the first time on the lowest difficulty and in the last few seconds you make it from third place to first place. Then you practice and practice and practice and level up your car and what not, play the same course on the lowest difficulty and… in the last few seconds you make it from third place to first place. The amount of rubberbanding is off the charts here. The beloved Mario Kart is notorious for rubberbanding too, but most people playing that can achieve an early and persistent lead in first place on the lowest difficulty and better gamers can do it on higher difficulty as well. Here it is impossible even on lowest difficulty. Buy five extra "blasts" (nitros) to add to your default three. Use them all up at the beginning of a longer track and see that this does not put you in the top three for even a moment. Do the first half of a race without steering at all and then put in some effort and see how much rubberbanding happens. This is just asinine. (I've even seen one play a hacked version with infinite blasting reaching 1st place on normal mode only in the last 10 seconds of a 1:38 race.) Hey game designers, if you don't like the thought of a player getting the lead early, just spread out the starting positions.

There is a mode that demands you do four races in a row and it gives you an infinite amount of race retry options. Money to win literally lies on the street and you collect it even if you don't quite manage to touch it. It is all too easy to make CPU-controlled cars explode and then doing it isn't useful unless the end of the track is in sight because they immediately respawn (sometimes in front of you). You can do a side wheelie, but where are the narrow openings for shortcuts that would make this move really useful? Falling off the track doesn't lead to a game over or a restart of the race or even the loss of two seconds and a teleport back because… falling off the track simply cannot happen since your car bumps into invisible walls or just floats in the air above a chasm. What these design decisions add up to is this: There is no feeling of mastery here and no thrill of pushing your luck.

So is this game a solid 10 or what? HAHA. No slipstream effect, no other game modes beyond the basics, no ghost data in time trial, no option to watch a race replay, no sexy people waving flags and handing me awards, no message from the makers telling me I'm a good boy or girl or robot for collecting all the keys on the tracks. There are loading times even for just getting to the main menu or redoing the same race (there were games on PS1 like Wip3out that avoided this). All courses are A to B only (unlike Cruis'n World on the N64). What else can I moan about? Oh yeah, for a game with such a goofy over-the-top style, there is a remarkable lack of air control. But if you only play it for half an hour, it feels like one of the KOOLEST GAMES EVER M8. So despite everything I said above, it's an excellent choice for kids having a party. No need to tell them that the odds for getting pushed down a cliff or destroyed by a meteor or eaten by a giant ape are zero ;) Let them sweat in terror I say. I rate this a 3/10 for serious gamers such as myself since it has so much rubberbanding and so much stuff you just clip through it almost ceases to be a game! With a few simple tweaks it could have easily been a solid 7. Oh well.