Hard to tell if CTR is over or underrated. You compare it to Mario Kart and it's got worse multiplayer. Between this and Diddy Kong Racing it's a toss up as to who has the better single player. What I like about Crash Team Racing is that the drifting system is easy to understand with room to improve and the overall balance of everything is solid. This game you can beat in an afternoon or two so really I recommend it to anybody.

It's also a good alternative to Mario Kart in terms of multiplayer. But when you have party games you need to take into account that many people won't be as down to experiment. Crash Team Racing multiplayer doesn't have a ton to offer that Mario Kart 64 doesn't so they're more alternatives than competitors. But since Mario Kart has the superior brand recognition, it's always the go to at gatherings.

crash team racing (CTR) is a game for the longest time i've wondered if undervalue. as far as kart racers go, MK64 was obviously the big trendsetter, but i do think CTR succeeds in a lot of ways MK64 falls short. the movement feels so much better and less stiff, and it feels like you're given a lot more room to do interesting things, whether it be short cuts or miniturbos in short turns. i think if we were just judging the kart racers of the 90s on how they feel, CTR would easily take the gold medal.

where i get lost with CTR is in the surrounding crust of it. adventure mode is fine for what it is, but relic races are agonizingly tedious if you're trying to go for platinums (what, you play crash bandicoot games and don't go for the platinum relics?). and boss races largely feel useless; anyone who has a basic competency with CTR's systems will be able to pass a boss character by the first lap and leave them in the dust until the end. lastly, i just don't really feel very passionate about a lot of CTR's tracks. they're extremely hit or miss for me, and while the good ones (hot air skyway, polar pass, oxide station) are usually ones i look forward to racing on, the bad ones (n. gin labs, tiger temple, coco park) are either dull or genuinely unfun to race on.

hell, even some of the tracks i like, such as papu's pyramid, sewer speedway, or polar pass, become nightmares to try and optimize for either relic races or time trials. the tracks in CTR have a love for cycle-based obstacles that make optimizing them have this annoying element of RNG that ruins the experience for me. i also have broader nitpicks with the game, like how the whole "you have to do a minimum of three time trials per stage if you want to complete everything" aspect is really tedious and annoying, especially when your first time trial beats either of the ghosts (which it often will). and i expect that this point will be contentious with fans, but i've never really given a shit about the soundtrack and found it to be fairly unmemorable, especially when you compare it to contemporaries like diddy kong racing. that's pretty bad for a crash bandicoot game, but it's also the kiss of death for a kart racer, regardless of when it comes out.

i'm dogging on this game a lot in this review because it feels like the positives are obvious to state. the game looks great for PS1 (and still holds up in most respects, imo), it controls well, the items are fairly balanced and it never feels like you lose a race because your opponent got lucky, etc. i have never outright disliked CTR, let's be clear on that. when i was younger, i was obsessed with it, if anything. i just also see that it has a lot of things that hold it back from being that special type of game to me. i appreciate what it did for the genre, though, because i suspect it was what really sold the idea of the kart racer as a viable spinoff for later series to try. and how can i dislike anything that might've helped lead us to the eventual apex of kart racers known as sonic & all stars racing transformed?

I'm a fan of kart racers. Heck, one of the possible themes for the TR I'm running this month was nearly "kart racers" before it became "crossover games" X3. After all the mainline Crash games on PS1, I figured I may as well pick up CTR (known as Crash Bandicoot Racing here in Japan) as well since it was also just a couple bucks. I beat the main story mode in about 3 or so hours, and then went and did a bunch of time trials and a few medal missions over the course of another 3 or 4 hours.

The story of the game is fairly simple. An alien named Nitros Oxide comes to Earth and claims to be the fastest racer in the galaxy. If no one can beat him in a race, then he'll enslave everyone on the planet and take over. In response, a bunch of the cast of the Crash games build their own karts, (in some cases) learn how to drive, and gear up to see who among them is the fastest so they can challenge Nitros. It's a silly, not terribly present story, but it does make the game's overall construction more like Diddy Kong Racing than Mario Kart 64, as it has races against boss characters much like DKR does.

As a racer, it's a pretty darn fun one. Mechanically, it's a well-put together racer, and very thankfully also has dual-shock support (as one would hope a PS1 game in 1999 would do). The most notable positive change from something like Mario Kart 64 is how you do boosting. Jumping at the top of a ledge will give you a boost upon landing, but the way grind-boosting is done has also changed from prior kart racers. Instead of just grinding for a while and then getting a speed boost, you wait until the bar in the lower right goes from green to red (or watch for the smoke coming out of your kart to go from white to black, like I did) and then press the other shoulder button to activate the boost. You can even do this trick up to 3 times per grind! It adds a lot of active thinking to racing beyond just grinding whenever you can and taking corners as well as you can, and I really liked it.

The biggest negative thing in the game's mechanics I would say are the way it handles powerups. Now, for the most part, the powerups in the game are fine copies/modifications on the things Mario Kart brought to the table previously. Potions don't just slow you down like a banana peel would, they also make it so you can't use items for a while. TNT boxes don't just slow you down like a fake box would in Mario Kart, they hop on you for a while and if you hop enough yourself, you'll be able to get it off of you and not get slowed down. What I think the game really stumbles on is how you can collect Wumpa Fruit as you race. Get 10, and your powerups get even stronger. TNT boxes now become nitro crates that explode on contact. Potions now not only make it so you can't lose items, but also slow you down significantly. They seem to kinda miss the point of powerups as an equalizing force in these kinds of games, and overly reward people already doing well in a way that I find drags down the whole experience. It's far from a game breaker, but it's not a mechanic I have any love for.

The game has 16 different tracks to go through its story mode with, as well as a handful of battle mode tracks (which also have associated use in the story mode) as well as time trials and versus modes of course. The story mode also has a big world map to drive around to the different tracks in, just like Diddy Kong Racing has. The time trails are kinda weird, as it's not just racing fast through the courses (at least in the adventure mode). There are boxes with numbers on them littering the course, and hitting that box will freeze the countdown clock for that many seconds, meaning you're not just racing through the tracks quickly, but quickly and precisely (though the game does have normal time trials and "ghosts" to compete against as well).

It's a neat take on time trials to give the story mode a bit more to do, and the battle courses have similar "collect all the things within the time limit" aspects to their inclusion in the single-player mode as well. There are also medal challenges in the story mode's normal tracks, which involve not only winning the race, but also going to shortcuts and out of the way parts of the track to collect big 'C', 'B', and 'R' letters (the title acronym), which adds another element of challenge to races you've probably gotten pretty good at by now.

The only really negative part of the story mode is the boss races, something that CTR takes from DKR and fails to really make any more fun than they already aren't in that game. The concept of the boss tracks is that they serve as gates between the differently themed areas in the world map, and there are five of them in total (and if you do a BUNCH of the extra content, you can even unlock most of those guys as playable characters if you're keen to). They're one-on-one racers on a track from that area, but they're not against big animals like they are in DKR. They're against boss characters from Crash who race like normal racers. The bosses have really strong rubber banding and also infinitely spawn powerups behind them whenever they're ahead of you. However, the prize boxes on these levels also very frequently give you triple packs of rockets (this game's red shell), so a lot of these races comes down to not very fun one-v-ones trying to dodge powerups and then rocketing them close enough to the finish line that they won't have time to rubber band ahead of you. These are easily the worst parts of the game, and it's just a small mercy that they're not super hard due to all the rockets.

As far as changes between the English and Japanese versions of the game, there really aren't many. Those that are here are cosmetic and mostly found immediately, namely the change to the title (now it's CBR instead of CTR), the new title screen, and the new title screen music (as all the other PS1 Crash games have in Japan). Other than that it's clumsily integrated rumble support and a few very minor cosmetic changes, like all the trophy girls having their eye colors changed to brown.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's not my new favorite kart racer or anything, but it's a damn good racing game, and certainly one of the best to ever try and steal Mario Kart's thunder from this era. The mistakes it takes and innovates on from other racing games of the time are unfortunate, but they're minor enough that they don't come close to ruining the entire experience. The positives to this game easily outweigh the negatives, and this is a game I can easily recommend to anyone who likes racers (even over the remake, because this one isn't bogged down with crappy, post-launch micro-transactions).

A hard game.

The game has some very difficult levels, but overall its not impossible to any degree. I did struggle on some tracks, but had a great time playing through the story.

The score does not reflect how good the game actually is, I just dont like racing games that much.

70/100

An absolutely great kart-racer, rivalling Mario Kart 64 for my favorite of all time. The Adventure mode does a great job of prepping you for playing against friends with extra modes like CTR Challenges, where you collect three letters hidden throughout the course, and Relic Races to practice speedrunning and alternate pathways.

Typically, racers like these are purchased to mostly play against friends, but the single player is worth playing as a practice mode that actively teaches you the fastest pathways through placing time trial boxes and CTR tokens on the fastest pathways and shortcuts, rather than just letting you figure it out with experimentation.