Crash Time III: Highway Nights

The first thing that made me laugh is the way that these game titles translate on the Xbox 360 console. Crash Time 2 has a number whereas this one has roman numerals. No idea why but I’m sure it made sense to someone.

Anyway, this is the final Crash Time game of the series for me and I dived straight in after completing Crash Time 2. I even started playing it before completing Crash Time 2 due to that insufferable grind for the State of Emergency achievement.

Crash Time III puts you back in the shoes of Semir and Ben, whose American voices are now almost indistinguishable from each other, as they go on the trail of some left wing extremists who are blowing up cars in the city. It actually has a story arc where you see the end of the game in the opening cinematic and the game takes place over the seven days leading up to this opening event.

Along the way, there will be car chases – which were a little more forgiving than the previous game – and races as you go undercover to infiltrate some street racing guys… that spend all their time racing around a race track and not on the street. It’s all a bit weird but I would expect nothing less at this point in the series.

The gameplay is a lot more refined from the second game but they introduce a day and night cycle. While this adds a bit of realism, it also makes it a lot hard to see what’s going on when the sun goes down. Also, the colours used in the textual overlays were poor choices as I couldn’t see what my targets were for most missions.

While I say it’s more refined, it still suffers from the standard Crash Time bullshit of resets favouring the AI, the environment being your worst enemy and a terrible control system. It’s kind of hard to get wound up by this game as it’s so much better than Crash Time 2, despite doing most of the same things. That’s another criticism I suppose, it doesn’t really offer anything new.

Along the lines of not offering anything new, the game even makes fun of this as some point. Semir has to drive a tank and he makes a quip about the fact they pulled the same shit in the previous two games… though I can’t remember driving Crash Time’s version of a tank in the 2^nd game? Anyway, I did find this highly amusing and it endeared me to the characters a little more.

Looks wise, it hasn’t aged well either and as I’ve said, the environment interferes too much with the gameplay. Musically, it’s quality. It’s got the same soundtrack as its predecessors and it goes really well with the gameplay for the most part.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

After the horror show that was Crash Time 2, we are back to a more standard list without a horrible grind. There is still a grind but nowhere near as horrible or depressing as train-gate.

The main point of concern with the list, and probably the game itself, is that two achievements are unintentionally missable due to a glitch. Around the half way point, you will be given a car list with a load of cars that need to be collected. In order to get them, you need to go into patrol mode and will randomly appear. Once they appear you need to pull them over and steal them. There are ten cars to collect and you can supposedly do this at your leisure. However, if you don’t do it before completing the last mission of the game, you will lock yourself out of the achievements for getting 100% and for unlocking all cars. The reason for this is that there is a mission that follows collecting the cars and this mission won’t appear if you have already completed the game – a glitch that will never be fixed.

Aside from these, there are a lot of samey achievements like destroying 100 cars and 1,000 objects. Driving 1,000 kilometres makes a return too. Outside of the main game, there is some mild grinding to do but at least it offers some slight variety. The first two are quite small. There is a replayable mission in patrol where you have to drive a 13-checkpoint race which awards you with discount tickets. You need to get a million discount tickets and you get 20,000 ticket points per checkpoint. Another small one is for destroying ten opponents. I only managed three by the end of the game, so I needed to grind this out playing the early training mission over and over again.

The last ones are all racing related. You must do a race on all the race tracks and in every vehicle in the game as well as winning a total of 50 races. In addition to this you must race two of the circuits for 30 laps. I am pretty sure these two need to be done in one go too.

It’s a very repetitive process and the various tracks of different lengths make the 50 wins a bit of a grind but at least the courses are varied. The 30 laps on the two circuits were the biggest pain but there is a trick – you don’t have to win the race, you can start the race up, leave it and cross the line after the AI has completed the laps and you will get the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Crash Time III is probably the best game in the series but I’m not sure that’s saying much. It does offer some non-serious, light hearted amusement but not enough to warrant the monetary or time investment. It took me around 15 hours to complete the story and grinding races and I’m glad to finally be done with the series.