Crash Time 2: Autobahn Polizei

Okay, so the last two games on my sales request list are the last two games in the Crash Time series. A series I stopped playing as it got repetitive but in hindsight, I should have cracked on as the last two games were easier on paper and I also wouldn’t have had to refamiliarize myself with everything that pissed me off the first three times I played these games.

Anyway, Crash Time 2 puts us in the shoes of Semir and Ben and no one explained what happened to Chris from the first game. It’s like they just changed Chris’ name to Ben and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Story wise, I’m not even sure there is one. You just chase guys down, pull them over or smash them to bits. The aim is to complete a series of cases, which are in no way connected to each other, and once you do the last case, that’s it – game complete. At least in the ‘game’ sense.

The main issues I have with the game don’t concern the non-committal journey from A to B, but the way you get there. The first thing was working out what I had to do. You are given briefings on what your goal but when chasing after opponents, this became a bit of guess work until I managed to crack their code. You will either be required ‘stop opponent’ or ‘force opponent to stop.’ The latter means ‘use driving skill to pull them over’ but the former means ‘smash the fuck out of them until their car explodes.’ This was in no way clear from the outset, but the handy loading screen hints told me what they meant about seven hours after I had figured it out. Thanks.

Also, I think I mentioned this in previous reviews, but the reset function is total bullshit. If you reset yourself after getting stuck on some arbitrary scenery or something, you are not going to catch the guy you are chasing unless you get lucky. This is even more bullshit as it works the other way when you are tasked with destroying an opponent. Several times, I had my opponent pinned where they can’t possibly get away… but they just reset and drive off. So you lose if you reset and lose if they reset. Fuck off.

Another issue I had, which I think is ever present in these games, is the lack of functionality in switching to and from reverse gear. In most games, you just hold down the brake until the car goes backwards. In this, you have to press the brake button again after the car stops. I have no idea why they made this decision but it’s fucking annoying, especially when you need to pull off a fast change of direction. Which is all the time.

Sound wise, I have to say on a rare plus, the music is great. It’s borderline heavy metal and some of the riffs are easy listening that don’t get too repetitive over the game’s lifecycle. The dialogue is rubbish but that’s expected from the series and I also had a sound glitch for the first 25% of the game where it would just cut out. I’m not sure if this is my copy though or the game in general.

Graphically, it looks its age and it’s not going to win any prizes. In addition, I found the interactions with the environment to be clunky where some items would get stuck on you and stop you moving.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

I would say that putting up with the shit I’ve mentioned above is the biggest challenge for 90% of this list. You will get 6 achievements for completing the main story and there are no missable or difficulty specific achievements to speak off.

Outside of this, there is the standard Crash Time faire which are all really easy to do and can also be done fairly quickly. None of these are secret either so it’s also straightforward to work out where you need to go. Some of the more notable ones for this game are to drive for 50 km in manual transmission and to drive for 30 minutes on patrol without being interrupted. This second one is essentially asking you to not play the game for thirty minutes.

An exception to this is the MadCop mission where you explore the city to find car parts. These are in some ridiculous locations, but can all be found using a video guide.

Another grindy one is for winning 50 single races, but you can grind this out relatively quickly by playing the same short circuit over and over again.

Now for the annoying ones. There are two of these. One is for causing 10,000,000 damage in one race and the only way to realistically do this is to start a race on the freeway course, turn off the damage and smash into cars until you get to 10,000,000. You can double up and get the achievement for destroying 100 cars as well. It will feel like a lifetime to get this far as Crash Time manages to make crashes boring.

Now for the bitch. Once you have completed the game and done the above achievement, you will likely have caused around 40,000,000 worth of damage. To get the last achievement, you will need to cause 1,000,000,000 worth of damage. I haven’t mistyped that. The best is, the fastest way to do this is to take the most expensive car in the game and drive it onto train tracks to get hit by a train. If the train destroys your car, you will get 1,000,000 worth of damage. That’s 0.1% of the total required, meaning you will have to repeat this tedious process close to 1,000 times to get the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

If the last achievement wasn’t there and I didn’t get that sound glitch, I think Crash Time 2 would be my favourite game in the series. As it stands, it’s poorly made, feels rough round the edges and outstays its welcome as far as completionists will be concerned. With the last achievement, it takes around 20 hours to complete the game, which is about 6 hours more than it should be.