Crash Time 5: Undercover

I imagine this is a massively obscure title. Not very many people have played it, or the rest of the Crash Time series, but I thought I would get them all as the announcement that they are no longer making Xbox 360s is bound to mean a price hike in obscure games. I have recently gone through my list of games to get and splurged some money on some of the more obscure ones which will hopefully yield more completions.

Anyway, Crash Time 5. I’m going out of order and the reason for this is that I didn’t release (because I didn’t check) that Crash Time 5 and 4 both have an online multiplayer. Crash Time 5 was the easier game so it got completed first.

Crash Time 5 follows the story of Ben and Semir, two German American undercover police offers who are trying to take down 8 drugs and weapons couriers. The entire game is controlled behind the wheels of cars so this is all just framing for a racing game and the premise makes no sense at all. First, you have to do undercover missions for the guys you are trying to catch. Then you have to go racing. I still don’t get this. Why the fuck would some bit-part gangster hire you to do something and then you go off to do some racing, not for money, when you could be doing some drug running or something? It makes no sense. Not even winning the race means you are more likely to be chosen to do some work for the evil guys but even if that’s the case, why are the races on racetracks rather than checkpoint races across the city? This would actually test your ability to drug run rather than circuit race but whatever, we’ll run with it I guess.

The dialogue in the game is so bad it’s laughable. I assume that as the developers are German, that this is down to poor translation but sometimes what’s being said doesn’t tie up with the subtitles which surely means that the American voice actors didn’t even read the scripts they were given. There are also some bizarre sounding sentences. When you are winning a race by a long way, some guy will say ‘Your rivals are a long time coming.’ What does that even mean and what the hell was it translated from?! I get that it’s a small company but couldn’t they have paid someone from England £50 to read through their translations before releasing the game in English speaking countries? There’s not masses of dialogue and I personally would have done for them.

The gameplay is very arcade in its racing style which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there are several issues I had with the racing events. The game suffers from Mario Kart syndrome in that even if you do get really far ahead (and your rivals are a long time coming), you will get pegged back really easily if you make one mistake. This is incredibly annoying when it happens on the last lap of a six lap race. The sand pits are also ridiculously unforgiving and if you do go into one by mistake, the game either slows you down to two miles an hour or respawns you 50 metres backward on the track. As I said above; stupid.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 32 Achievements

There isn’t much to the achievement list but it still takes a while to get through everything mainly because the main story takes an age to complete. There are 11 story related achievements which are unavoidable if you play through the ‘career’ mode and you will get the majority of the weapon achievements along the way as well. You will most likely need to grind out a few road blocks and shields though as you don’t get a lot of chances to use them.

There are a couple of miscellaneous achievements which are quite simple to get but one you may miss is for driving backwards for 200 metres as you don’t really have a reason to do this.

Outside of this, there are three sort of grindy achievements and one of them is just annoying. You have to drive in every car in the game and this isn’t too much of a problem if you continually use cars as you unlock them. You will still need to do some single player races after to get the last few but it’s much for muchness because of the last two. You need to drive for 1,000km which is also made superfluous due to the last one.

The last one I got was for racing on all the racetracks in the game and the reason for this is because for some reason, all of the races you were made to do in career mode don’t count. So you have to race them all again in single player racing. Why?? The races are pointless to begin with, so much so that the game doesn’t credit you for racing on the specific race tracks in career? Who knows.

Multiplayer

There are a whole three achievements for the multiplayer and they can all be gained in about 5 minutes. You need to win a match, win a Deathmatch without dying and play Deathmatch without dying. So basically win a first to one kill Deathmatch. The only hard thing about this is finding some else to play with as no one plays the game anymore – if they even did in the first place.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Crash Time 5 isn’t a quick completion but it is made funny by the dialogue stuff I’ve mentioned above. Ben and Semir don’t have much camaraderie in this one though and it seems like a cheap sign off of the series.

I wouldn’t recommend the series based on this entry. Crash Time 4, from my limited experience with it, seems much more diverse in the way it’s been made and I’m wondering what the earlier titles will have to offer.