Crash Time

After my out of order completions of Crash Time 4 and 5, I am now back in the world of order and competing the first Crash Time game. The reasons for playing games in order became even more apparent during my playthrough of this one. To sum it up, it’s a pile of shite and Crash Time 2 will hopefully reveal a drastic improvement from this introduction to the series.

Crash Time see you take control of Semir and Chris, two faceless German traffic cops with a pageant for destruction and ridiculous car chases and neither of them can get out of their cars.

I’m now struggling to think about what I hated most about the game. Was it the tail missions? The instant replays? The fact that it’s called Crash Time and you aren’t really allowed to crash? The dialogue? The glitches? The trains? The respawns?

The tail missions are an absolute joke. I played on hard the whole time but sometimes these verged on unfair. If you get too close you have to back off. But not too much because otherwise they will speed off into the horizon never to be seen again. One of these missions has you start on the verge of failing and you have to speed off and not crash and almost hope that your opponent makes a mistake.

The instant replays were the most sinfully annoying thing in the game. It triggers automatically every time you have an accident and it replays your mistake, which doesn’t look spectacular as the graphics are shit. It also breaks the game play meaning that you have to be aware of where you were before the game decided to show you your fuck up again. Thankfully there is an option to turn this off which I found towards the end of the game but the steering stick is also a button... which when pressed by accident triggers a fucking replay!

Playing on hard means that if you even scratch your car, you can fail the mission. Calling a game Crash Time and penalising you every time you have a slight accident labels the game as an oxymoron or, a poor translation. But it’s not a bad translation because they make a joke in the loading screens that it’s called Crash Time but don’t take it literally. Ha ha ha.

The dialogue is awful but what else is new. This is more funny than anything else.

The gliches I experienced were just twatish. On one mission, the vehicle I had to follow fell through the game floor forcing me to restart the mission. The general game mechanics seem unfair too. During pursuit missions where you have to not damage the opponent’s car, the opponent will occasionally crash due to nothing you’ve done causing you to fail the mission.

The trains. My God, the trains. Crashing maybe off limits but racing is part and parcel of the game. So why the fuck would you have a fucking train crossing on the road during a race? If you are in the lead, it allows your opponents to catch back up effectively serving as a mid-race reset. It’s so stupid.

The one that caused me to scream, and even my partner turn around and ask, ‘How is that fair?’ is to do with the AI respawning after they fuck up. Some missions, you have to fully damage a car to get it to stop. So If I ram my opponent off the road, pin them against a tree and put them in a position where I can damage them until they are destroyed, why the fuck can they respawn on to the road and speed away from me? It’s so, so cheap. My favourite time the game did this to me was when I pushed the car on to the barrier at the edge of the road and I could damage the car while my opponent slid along the barrier. As soon as it had stopped sliding for a few seconds, it respawned 700 meters further down the road causing me to fail the mission for being too far away from my opponent. This caused me to use some choice language: fuck you, you fucking game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

There are 9 missions in the game each carrying 3 achievements for completing the mission on easy, medium and hard. Completing the game on hard nets you 27 of the achievements which is an achievement in itself because it means you have managed to stomach all of the shit I’ve mentioned above.

Outside of the missions, you have to do all of the usual Crash Time stuff like drive all the cars, drive on all the tracks and drive 1,000 km. This time though, they didn’t offer enough content to get to 1,000 km before you race on all the tracks and complete career mode. I had to do an additional 100 km after doing everything.

There are few random ones in there too like doing a loop-de-loop in the sewer and jumping fully over the river. The first achievement I unlocked was simply for pushing the police light button. This one seems to indicate they were struggling for ideas.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Crash Time is a poor racing game by any standards that doesn’t even agree with its own title. It’s the most difficult game in the series which isn’t a massive surprise considering how poorly constructed it is. It’s an avoid for Gamerscore hunters and just general gamers alike.