It’s hard to overstate just how much Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled had to get right so that it would work as a remake of one of the few kart racers that could compete with Mario Kart. These thoughts persisted up until launch, with some bumps in the road derived from information that surfaced due to broken street date copies. But now that the game has launched in full, and everyone’s gotten a chance to play it, yes, Nitro Fueled is a fantastic time.
Though that’s in a general public perspective. For myself, a longtime fan of the original, there were a few particular shoes to fill and some things that had to be equal to or even better than the original. So, in this video, I’ll be briefly talking about those aspects.
One of the things Nitro Fueled had to live up to the most was the overall physics, and right away I knew they wouldn’t be 1:1. The N. Sane Trilogy had this as well, and that game turned out fine despite the relative difference in control. The physics in Nitro Fueled are indeed faithful to the original, albeit with their own quirks, one of the key differences being the gravity. In the original game, the gravity manifested in a way that can best be described as floaty. This was most noticeable in tracks such as Cortex Castle and Oxide Station which have particularly big jumps.
Nitro Fueled’s take on the gravity is something I unexpectedly came to enjoy. When it comes to those high drops, you really feel it with how fast you drop combined with the camera angle and the character animation. And it’s just a microcosm of how good the physics are, which makes going at high speeds not only precise, but also fun.
Since Nitro Fueled is a modern remake of a PlayStation 1 game made with rather limited technology, another thing it had to do to appease me was inject a high dose of character that the original game was sort of lacking in, not for lack of trying, but because there was only so much you could do on the old gray machine. Looked great as a kid, looks sorta dated nowadays. One can tell the game succeeds at character as early as the Adventure Mode introduction where Oxide presents his challenge. Instead of just being Oxide tapping at buttons for two minutes, now it’s Oxide showing off how incredibly smug he is via the new animation, as well as how uninterested Crash himself is, because surely this is routine to him. Then we cut to everyone else shown in the intro, expanding on the once simplistic cutscenes and then some.
And it doesn’t let up with the bosses either, as their scenes describe their personality much more effectively compared to when they just sat in a kart. And then you get to the rest of the game, with art evolution so extensive that it could fill an entire video, so instead of doing that I’ll let the rest of the footage speak for itself. If you look around, there’s entire pages detailing just how much has gone into reworking the environments and characters for Nitro Fueled, showing the level of commitment Beenox had for the project.
CTR was really fun back in the day, especially with human opponents, though you were limited if you didn’t have a MultiTap, and I didn’t. Remember those things? Either way, that leads us into the biggest addition to the remake, initially botched hard but then took a turn for the better in record time: online play. I did not capture any footage of day one online play, but I was unfortunate enough to try it and find myself not really racing so much as watching other players teleport repeatedly. Unlike most games, though, Nitro Fueled is evidently under the eyes of a developer aiming to please.
Mere days after the complaints started, Beenox had released patches for every system Nitro Fueled was on to remedy the online issues, and remedy them they did, bringing the online play to its ideal state. It goes without saying that a game with heavy online focus should ship with good online from release day, but the fact Beenox were hypercompetent in stabilizing it so soon and being communicative about it speaks volumes to their integrity, especially with how they are handling post launch content with the Grand Prix system.
On that topic, one must mention the Pit Stop system. This was another aspect that had worried me to some level when it was leaked, though I abstained from any real opinions until I had the game in my hands. A week later, I’d say the addition is far from bad, especially what it could have been, but it needs some reworking, starting with the Wumpa Coins.
When playing, and only when connected to the Internet, you earn Wumpa Coins which are spent in the Pit Stop to unlock a flurry of extra cosmetics and the Nitro Kart characters. At face value, this screams microtransactions, but curiously enough, there are no microtransactions in sight. That is definitely a show of restraint, but what makes it odd is how coins seem to be distributed. I’m going to link a Reddit post that goes into detail on how the system seemingly works, but I’d like to shift the focus on offline play. This is especially an issue for Switch owners who want to enjoy that portability while still earning a bit of income for when they head back online. I understand that the system may be designed this way so it can mesh with the upcoming Grand Prix modes, but could we at least get a compromise for those moments when we’re on the road without an access point? I’d love to see Beenox try and incorporate a solution; not that it gravely affects me personally since the online payout is worthwhile enough if you race for a good while, and I’m not rushing to unlock everything, but yes, some better distribution of coins is needed.
You’ll notice that this is pretty barebones as a review. It’s not really a review per se, it’s just me talking about aspects of the game within the context of a longtime fan. It’s these elements that make Nitro Fueled one of my favorite remakes in a long while. It didn’t have to reinvent the wheel or anything, just revamp the visuals of old and insert them onto a new system, which is what the N. Sane Trilogy did. But Beenox evidently did way more than that. They practically made it the kart racing version of Everyone Is Here (Almost, anyway) while staying true to the fundamentals that made CTR what it was almost 20 years ago. It’s not perfect by any means, since things like the Pit Stop need adjustments, and in terms of fast, convenient accessibility, the original and it’s cheat codes will beat Nitro Fueled’s steady progression based system. But otherwise, I’d say, as someone who’s played CTR for 14 years, Nitro Fueled can claim to top the original. And judging from the Grand Prix roadmap, it’s only going to get better from here. Bless you, Beenox, for delivering this to us.
