I never wanted it to compete directly with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, or even with Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed – for example I love the skill-based power slide and jump hang-time boost mechanics, and I'll relish its challenge - so deep down Nitro-Fuelled has the heart of a 32-bit engine purring inside of it, which is spot-on to me. I hope that gamers don’t expect Nitro-Fuelled to revolutionise the kart racing sub-genre for the modern day, though. My favourite point in the review is when Stephen says, "What's immediately clear is that the developer has a lot of reverence for the source material, and rightly so", because I think that this is one of the most important things for any remaster.
I can't wait until I get to play Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled tonight, it's one of my most anticipated PS4 games of 2019, and reading Stephen's review has me even more hyped to play it.Īs the review states, it plays just like the original, and it sticks closely to the PSone game's gameplay template. Good luck affording anything at the Pit Stop if you only want to play Adventure mode, or split screen with your chums. You'll earn several times more Wumpa Coins for playing over the wires. It's a fine enough system for unlocking things, but what's a little irksome is the heavy emphasis on online play. This is an in-game currency you earn for doing basically anything, and you spend them at the Pit Stop, a shop where cosmetics and characters are rotated on a daily basis.
From our limited experience, the net code seems very solid, although that's possibly helped by the fact there's no physical collision between participants.Īnother part of the game that is decidedly new school is Wumpa Coins. You can, of course, flaunt your unlocked goodies online, where up to eight players can engage in races or battles. They don't affect stats, so they're purely visual, but it's fun to choose your favourite combination. There are dozens of kart bodies, paint jobs, wheels, stickers, and decals to mix and match. There's a vast number of characters to play as, and all of them have a handful of skins, but the developer has gone crazy with kart cosmetics. Where it isn't scared to modernise is with vehicle and character customisation. Whether this is a bad thing or not depends on you, but it's another way the game feels afraid to step into the modern day. Aside from Adventure mode, where you're able to choose from three difficulties, races and time trials all have pretty high expectations. Again, die-hard fans will appreciate this, but the majority of players are going to struggle. In fact, the level of challenge on display across the game is rather high. There's an argument that all this just takes practice, but the fact is it's very easy to mess up sharp bends and not easy enough to drift when the game wants you to be doing so 90 per cent of the time. What's more, some of Naughty Dog's old track designs require some pretty precise manoeuvring, and the result in 2019 is a handful of tortuous turns. You hop in the air before you begin power sliding, and in that window of time, you'll likely turn too much in one direction to then comfortably start drifting. It's not that it doesn't work, it just feels a bit too stiff. However, it's a finicky part of the racing that perhaps could've benefited from being modernised. Having said that, the skill-based drift and boost system is present and correct, and you'll need to utilise it if you want to keep up with the surprisingly challenging AI drivers.
CTR remains a fun, speedy kart racer that anyone can pick up and play. The controls feel responsive, and anyone who's played the game before will slip back into it like an old pair of slippers.
On the plus side, it's an extremely tight arcade racer. The handling feels very similar to the original game, for better and worse. Similarly, the redone music and effects all sound great the presentation feels consistent with that of the N.
Each race course is chock full of brand new set dressing while maintaining the layout of the track itself, and the results speak for themselves. From the wonderfully animated splash screen to the painstakingly detailed tracks, a lot of effort has been poured into making this a remake on par with the likes of Spyro: Reignited Trilogy. As we said, the game gets a lot of stuff right.