One of the best and vibrant kart racers ever. In fact, It just gets better and better the more you learn and master it. The Adventure mode is cute too and I love its goofy concept.

Then playing the time trials to get N-Trophy was a total ballache.

Then Activision at to get its grubby hands back in it and kill this game. including add insane micro-transactions and making this game grindy.

Lets look back at the the happy times, easy 10 for me :)

Para mí, el mejor juego de carreras de karts que hay, lo disfruto mucho más que Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Su jugabilidad me parece mucho más dinámica y divertida, el roaster de personajes es una oda a toda la franquicia de Crash, no solo a los 3 primeros de Naughty Dog, incluso están de invitados personajes de la franquicia de Spyro. Durante el primer año del lanzamiento de juego hicieron una barbaridad de contenido para mantener a la comunidad viva jugando cada mes con diferentes skins, circuitos, personajes nuevos... Yo por suerte pude vivir ese momento y disfrutarlo junto a un gran amigo mío y os diré que fue único.
Ahora ya tenéis disponible todo el contenido, tendréis que desbloquearlo jugando y jugando y jugando, pero aún así, os lo recomiendo encarecidamente.

A solid remake from a team that clearly had a lot of love and consideration for the franchise's history as a whole, making sure to include just about every character ever. While the inclusion of tracks from later entries in the Kart series was a welcome addition, the reworking of them to remove the anti-gravity sections is very disappointing. Online continues to be where most of the replay value resides and as frustratingly slow as it can be to amass Wumpa Coins for the item shop on weekdays, it's also partly what has kept me chipping away at it for a few hours every weekend when the XP bonuses are in effect, ensuring that I never actually have to spend a penny more than the cost of the base game itself.

Don't fix what isn't broke.

Nitro-Fueled understood what needed to be done bringing CTR to modern consoles; really not that much. It nails the feel of the original PS1 title and adds flare and the current gen graphics, makes some of the trickier aspects like drift-boosting a little easier to read, but by and large this is the same PS1 CD-R with a fresh gleam of paint and a Blu-Ray disc. It slathers on an extra helping of Nitro Kart levels, whcih was a fun new experience for me and many people because who the hell played Nitro Kart.

Having the option to play the Legacy Music was also a nice touch, I almost wish Legacy Voice Lines would be available too for that extra kick of nostalgia, but it's a moot point when you have one of the greatest kart racers here.

It gets 9 stars rather than 10 because of it's pissy little microtransactions, sure you can get everything without paying but I'd rather it not be there in the first place. Also Baby Crash/Coco/Cortex freak me out.

I love this game. It is probably the hardest kart racing game I've ever played, but it is so much more fun than any Mario Kart game I've ever played imo.

You can't fall sleep behind the wheel in this one, it ain't like Mario Kart where most of the modes are easy as hell. Here, you have to stay alert at all times because any wrong move will cause you to lose the race...And that is just against the bots!

I love the drifting and boosting system this game goes for, it's more of a risk vs reward situation. If you want to go fast in this game, you have to master not just the controls, but the tracks as well... And lemme tell you, some of these tracks are a BITCH to race through.

This game is great, because there are so many tracks and characters from Crash's history, and it doesn't really have that many downsides......But the ones it does have...? Oh boy...

Yeah, this game is filled to the brim with content....Content that you have to unlock, either by playing the game a lot...Or macrotransactions. Yes, macro, because most of the good shit you can actually unlock in this game, like ALMOST THE ENTIRE CAST OF CHARACTERS AND SKINS, are all behind a paywall.

This game is one of the scummiest examples of a greedy videogame company charging me money for a game I ALREADY PAID FOR. It really doesn't incentivize to play much, when no matter how much I play, every single alternate costume and character is behind a store rotation, and a price so ridiculously high, that I would have to play like a 100 races or more, just to get enough to purchase just ONE ITEM.

It's not like I could tho. Online servers for this game were pretty much dead since week one on Switch, since everyone else is playing Mario Kart 8 instead. And playing locally with friends is a massive chore, because the loading screens in this game are ETERNAL; it takes a while for anything to happen, at least on Switch.

I just fucking hate Activision/Blizzard for not releasing this shit on PC where it could actually have an active community, and also for killing this game by filling it with shameless macrotransactions. Truly, fuck these companies man, I'm so glad Toys for Bob cut ties with them.

I love this game. PC RELEASE WHEN?
CTR already had the best physics and singleplayer of any kart racer ever. What this remake brings to the table is that it doubles the number of great tracks, adds way more characters, allows for advanced kart customization, and even allows stat-swapping so you can use your favorite character on any track. Plus online.
Beenox is a great dev team. Activision is a bad publisher.
cons:
-the activision characters like Zam and Nina are ugly but I applaud Beenox for putting literally every Crash character into the game.
-the monetization is gross but its cosmetic only and I never had a problem unlocking everything worth getting through gameplay
-the game is far more skill-based than mariokart so online is unapologetically survival of the fastest.

Lastly I want to say that the artstyle in this is far better than Nsane trilogy and crash 4.

I was supposed to do a "quick replay" of this so I could use it as a refresher before I come here and gush about it. I then proceeded to 101% the story, smash each Cup Race on Hard, and get the Master Wheels over a weekend. Oops.

My various musou reviews may have clued you into this fact already, but let me make it plain: I love genres that most people don't pay much mind to. Kart racers are one of them.

And CTR is the best, in my eyes. Nitro-Fueled just made it better.

The core difference is in the boosting. In most other kart racers, you drift to build up a 3-stage boost and then release to go flying forward.
CTR hands you more direct control: You drift, yes, but you boost manually. While this might seem like a straight boon, much like open-book exams, you need this control. Boosting becomes a game of timing; hitting the boost button as your brakes stir to speed up, doing this three times consecutively for a bigger boost.
Somewhat ironically, due to its ability to drift in a straight line, Speed types - the 'hardest' engine setup - are the easiest to use.

'Boost' as a state of being is also something that, at higher level play, must be maintained at all times. On some maps this is easy, as there are multiple boost pads that will immediately put you in maximum boost state and refresh that invisible timer. On some maps, ironically the 'easiest' maps, it becomes a test of pure skill more than anything.

Similarly, boosting is deeply tied into the map layout. Most maps with shortcuts have at least one that requires you to be going as fast as possible unless you'll miss it, which means this is an entire game of "The Best MK8 maps".
Likewise there's a decent amount of movement tech that allows for some not-quite-intended skips (that Beenox willfully kept in). Once you learn that releasing the accelerator and holding brake in mid-air increases your turn speed, you enter a whole new level of skill.

...Which does lead me to this game's only mechanical downside, even though this downside benefits me specifically:

CTR is a very unforgiving game. Not so much against the AI, for they'll crumple even against an Acceleration engine, but kart racers are best enjoyed socially and this one... isn't. Having access to emulators means I can now play most of my dumped Switch library with friends, but CTR is never an option because the gap between myself and everyone else is country-sized.
Items in particular aren't very well balanced, and this game lacks any great equalizers like Mario Kart does. If you gain the lead in CTR, it's often hard to actually lose it unless you really fuck up or you're playing with players of a similar skill level.
Don't get me wrong, equalizing items do exist, but they either provide a negligible bonus that won't get a last place player to the front, or they have bad tracking that's easily avoided by taking a shortcut.

Okay, that's the CTR portion of this review done. Let's talk about Nitro-Fueled.

The base unupdated NF package includes the entirety of CTR, as well as every course from Nitro Kart and all of that game's characters. Plus, kart customization is a thing and there's a whole bunch of alternate karts/tires/colour schemes available, cool.

But as you may have heard, Activision live-serviced the shit out of this game via free monthly battle passes/seasons.

And... it was good. No, really. I know saying the words "live service", "battle pass" and "good" might make you wince, but I mean it when I say this was the only game to benefit from live servicing.

The seasons were easy to max out and mercifully kept the shop from overflowing. Casual play could see the season maxed out and all the goodies earned within about a week or two, and sweats like me could get it even quicker. Completing seasons gave you a ton of free stuff, as well as wumpa coins to buy out the store eventually. The actually appealing parts of each season were in the battle pass to boot, which was oddly out of character for Activision.
Add in all the free tracks, that AMAZING update that allowed people to select engine types independent of character, brand new time trials, a new mode specifically for addicts like me, and other small but meaningful updates, it was a pretty good deal.

The new tracks were fantastic by the way. A fantastic blend of fanservice, seasonal concepts, callbacks and good map design made them all memorable, and near the end I was arguably more excited for the free tracks than anything else.
And speaking as a Crash megafan, a lot of the scrimblo character picks were deeply surprising but not unwelcome. I can't poke fun at people who wanted utterly no-name picks for Mario Kart 8's booster pass when I was out here excited to get Komodo Moe, Pasadena O'Possum and Yaya Panda of all characters.

...

So.

You might've noticed a lot of past tense there, maybe not.

Either way, it's not coincidental. See, like all good things, CTRNF ended, and the state Beenox left the game in actually made me miss the live service shit.

With seasons now gone, all of their rewards have returned and are available permanent... ly in the shop. The Fortnite-esque shop with a rotation.

See, during the game's lifespan, the Fortnite shop was contentious, yes, but truthfully there wasn't much in it. Rotations were player-specific, meaning anything you bought would be knocked out of the pool. Wumpa coins came in at such a good rate that, as I alluded to up above, it was fantastically easy to buy out the shop and see it empty until the next season.

But nowadays the shop is stuffed with 8 seasons worth of stuff + the basegame items + some post-season reskins that most people have agreed were designed to be shop filler. What's worse is that despite the developers adding endlessly-resetting challenges that provide Wumpa coins, earning them isn't quite as easy anymore. Both because the seasons are over, and because playing online - which confers a massive bonus - is harder thanks to the deadened playerbase.

Now, ultimately all of this is kind of meaningless to the actual experience; no tangible content is hidden behind seasons or shops, and if you just want to play the best kart racer ever made you don't even need to glance at the store. The story, the tracks, the modes, they're all available from the getgo. This is, after all, why it's a 4.5 and not a 2.5.

Fortunately there is a Switch mod that unlocks all the shop stuff, but I know not everyone has either a hacked Switch or an emulator.

In the end, despite my woes about the current state of the game, it is still the king of kart racers to me. The game it's based on turns 25 this year and to this day it's never been dethroned.