REVIEW – Crash Bandicoot, the latest installment in the legendary platformer series, offers not only the classic jumping challenges, but also a brand new multiplayer mode in which players can fight against each other with different weapons and equipment. Crash Team Rumble is an exciting and fun game that can be enjoyed by fans and newcomers alike, but it is not without its flaws. Is it worth getting involved in the battle of the bandicoots?

There are few games that better exemplify the change in the industry than Crash Team Rumble (CTR). While Crash Bandicoot was once a single-player mascot platformer at the height of the genre’s popularity, CTR takes the heroes and villains of Naughty Dog’s and later Activision’s series and reimagines it as a 4v4 multiplayer game with live-action elements. To some, that might sound like using a once-proud streak as a cash cow. Crash Team Rumble, on the other hand, is a fun and surprisingly tactical PvP game, though it’s sometimes held back by the often-seen problems of games-as-a-service.

Crash Team Rumble pits two teams of four against each other in platform arenas that, at first glance, look a bit like the wide courses of a typical Crash game. It’s nice that the controls and the feel of the game perfectly reflect those of the traditional Crash games, so it provides an instantly recognizable experience in our hands.

Although the game only has one mode at launch, it is very well designed. The goal is to get 2000 wumpa fruits before the rival team. To do this, players spin, slam, and slide into crates and wumps scattered around the arena to collect them. If you move them into the goal area, after a moment they will permanently score a point for the team.

Run or shoot?

Each team can be made up of characters as you see fit and thanks to this, the rounds are different every time. Eight characters, divided into three classes, are available at launch: scorer, booster and blocker. Scorers are usually faster and can carry more wumpa, thus scoring more points at once. Blockers are very enjoyable defenders, with their higher damage moves designed to constantly disrupt enemy scorers like a fly buzzing around their ears forever. Boosters are sort of in-between roles that are meant to activate multipliers and unlock track-specific abilities, such as Aku Aku Masks, which give the entire team health and movement buffs, similar to previous Crash games.

The thresholds to unlock these game-changing abilities are high, but they work well as a result. It takes coordinated teamwork to get them, which means the team must always balance chasing such powerful unlocks with scoring or defending. In the arena, all eight players will always have to focus on multiple things, creating a high skill ceiling for those who use their time and space wisely.

Each character can be further developed with unique ability unlocks that are not limited to certain classes. You can further boost Crash’s scoring abilities with the Wumpa Stash, giving you 100 or more extra wumpa over time, or bolster his defensive abilities by throwing a Gasmoxian Guard at the enemy goal, routinely zapping them and interrupting their scoring attempts, with the added bonus of taking damage results in dropped wumps. Characters with such innate and customizable abilities allow for additional variety from turn to turn, as even a group of eight identical skins can belie a change in strategy over two turns due to a change in abilities on assigned cooldowns.

Favorites

In my time with the game, it was easy to grab the reins of a new character or ability and quickly figure out what was going on with them. Now I definitely have favorites in both respects, but the uses for each character and ability are obvious and it’s really satisfying to get to know them all.

A team could operate with up to four characters playing as Crash, the scorer, but they would have a hard time preventing the enemy team from scoring as well. Alternatively, a team can turbocharge defenders like N. Tropy and Dingodile, but then run the risk of scoring points too slowly. The game allows players to create their own team compositions, which can make for decidedly one-sided matches. However, in my experience, some seemingly incomplete team formations have led to victories if the team played together. I feel that voice communication in Crash is much more necessary than in many other PvP games, and as a result, I mostly played with a team of four, less enjoying it when I jumped in with random players.

Fun multiplayer

Crash Team Rumble offers surprising depth despite currently only having one game mode. It’s very much like a quasi-sports game, similar to Rocket League or Fall Guys, in the same way that it retains the classic feel of the Crash games. I think this is his greatest virtue – to create something new that still seems immediately familiar and easy to understand.

Although the strategies change from round to round, the game is consistently frenetic. Each player has goals and intentions, but these can change at a moment’s notice. I often laughed when blockers got tunnel vision from me, chasing me ineffectively as my mobility options were greater than theirs, and this chase sequence allowed my allies to take advantage in other ways, such as activating multipliers or using their own by getting their wumpas.

In other rounds, my girlfriend and I lined up as dual N. Brio blockers, both equipped with Gosmoxian Guards. These area-of-effect behemoths, coupled with Brio’s innate ability to morph into a big brute and clear the gate like a nightclub bouncer, resulted in a ridiculous defensive strategy that won us many consecutive games until we ended up with a team that which effectively turned against us. I feel like there’s some solid early-game meta-strategy, but nothing foolproof that I’ve seen, and that’s really exciting as someone living in a post-Knockout City world looking for the next fun arcade “sports” game.

Team strategies can change so much in the middle of 5-10 minute rounds. A team down by over a thousand wumpas, for example, may still be able to come back if they decide to press defensively and throw all kinds of blocking attacks and abilities at the opposition goal, while perhaps a single scorer slowly but surely piles up the wumpas. CTR would be dead if an early lead meant it was game over, but that’s not the case at all, provided a team knows what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, an esports caster-like announcer calls the round, which adds a little extra excitement. It doesn’t say much, but when it pops in to announce that a round is all the rage, or that the enemy team just called in a major unlock for a level, like a UFO relentlessly chasing players, it definitely adds to the drama. However, the possibility of late feats and comebacks makes it annoying that players can’t switch characters mid-game. Whoever the player starts the round with, they will end the game with, which seems pretty careless.

Battle of the Bandicoots

In general, the game brings the competitive elements well, while the menus and metagame have many more problematic aspects. The seasonal battle pass, for example, progresses too slowly, and many of the cosmetics you acquire overlap. Because the Crash characters are so drastically different in size, many of the unlockable headgear literally floats above the characters’ heads. Backpacks also regularly collide with character models, while some cosmetic categories like character shadows just aren’t interesting enough to be in demand. On the plus side, each character has their own unlock path up to level 15, with plenty of challenges to complete and cosmetics to unlock for free. These cosmetics aren’t exactly better than the ones in the battle pass, but at least they add some extra depth to the metagame, while the battle pass, which will be available for purchase in the future, is too slow to enjoy.

Small things that seem insignificant end up having too much of an impact on the game, like not being able to see your partying teammates in the lobby, no one but the host knowing when matchmaking has started, and strange error messages appearing after some matches that suggest , that the development was not saved, even though it happened. There are currently no daily challenges in the game, and weekly challenges cannot be viewed as a list. Instead, we see a new one as soon as we finish the one before it. I’ve looked at other games where a team has tried live-action elements for the first time, and these issues in CTR are reminiscent of those where unlocking metagame perks doesn’t feel right at first because the team is just getting used to them. These elements can be refined and I hope they will be.

Despite all these typical tell-tale signs, the game is strangely not free-to-play. While I don’t usually review games based on their merchandise, I will note that the $40 entry barrier seems to have shrunk the community out of the gate. In the 15 hours of play required for this review, I encountered the same players and teams multiple times, suggesting that the community is quite small so far, which affected my enjoyment, as facing the same teams can become boring and hinder the otherwise reliable, unpredictable element of any match. . I’m afraid that CTR doesn’t get the attention it deserves because the price expectations of players for a multiplayer-only game and the actual price of the game are vastly different.

Thank you to Magnew Kft. for the test code!

-BadSector-

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Toys for Bob

Style: Action/Shooter

Release: March 25, 2021.