Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is a complete rebuild of the kart-racing classic from the late nineties, prepared for modern consoles by Beenox. The core remains untouched: tracks full of shortcuts, beach curves, volcanic caves and futuristic highways, raced by characters from Crash the wombat's world. The main draw, though, is a driving model built around chaining boosts. The player charges boost by drifting and must release it with precisely timed hops to keep the acceleration going, and anyone who nails the rhythm can drive an entire lap essentially without ever slowing down. This one mechanic alone makes the game something more than relaxed family fun, splitting players into those who simply enjoy the colourful spectacle and those who hone the ideal racing line as a technical discipline.

There's an unusually large amount of content here. Alongside the tracks from the original, courses from the sequel Crash Nitro Kart were added, and there's a classic story mode with bosses and relic collecting, time trials, battle arenas and online matches. The developers also kept adding further tracks, karts and costumes in seasonal waves for months after release, so the offering grew far beyond the source material. On Switch the game runs at a lower resolution and with more noticeable compromises in detail than on more powerful consoles, but the smoothness of the driving remains intact, and in handheld mode it's one of the best-looking racers of its generation. The preserved local split-screen also makes the console an ideal machine for couch gaming.

The atmosphere is held together by cartoonish visuals with a bold palette and music that plays with the original themes in modern arrangements. Reception was very favourable, with reviewers praising above all the amount of content and the fidelity of the demanding driving model, while criticism was mainly aimed at unpolished online services in the first weeks after launch. Today it's the strongest competitor to Mario Kart on Nintendo's platform, a game that relies not on chaos and luck but on genuine driving skill and knowing the tracks down to the last corner.