Almost 30 years ago, the first Cruis'n racing game, Cruis'n USA, hit the arcades and people...played it. I think? I honestly haven't kept up with this series at all, and my experience with it is very limited. I played Cruis'n USA and Cruis'n World on the N64 at a friend's house, like once. In light of this it's probably a bad idea for me to make the official Cruis'n Blast discussion thread, but there was noone here to stop me, and now we all have to live with it.
This is what the 90's was like, kids. Commuting was hell on account of all the goddamn dinosaurs.In 2017, developer Raw Thrills and original series creator Eugene Jarvis made a brand new arcade title called Cruis'n Blast, and in 2021 they ported it to the Switch, with a bunch of new tracks, cars, features, bells and possibly also whistles. Instead of just the handful of tracks available in the arcades, the Switch version has 24 additional ones playable in four different difficulty settings, time trials, single races, four player split-screen multiplayer and LAN multi.
A pretty decent increase in value compared to the arcade version right there, but at the same time far below current industry standards, with no online component whatsoever. No online multiplayer or even online leaderboards for your best times. This is symptomatic of the game's underlying design philosophy; people who want to play arcade style racing the way it was made 20 years ago, with modern quality of life upgrades, but without modern ideas or gameplay features, are going to find exactly what they're looking for. Everyone else will have to figure out if they think that they can get enough enjoyment out of this game at the 20 bucks it's currently going for.
The game is fun enough, but it could use some extra polish in most areas. Case in point: Caught Jesus T-posing.As a racing game, Cruis'n Blast is very straight forward. The game's standard mode consists of 24 levels divided into six different cups, all of which have different themes. For example, one is set entirely at night, one is set during various harsh weather conditions, and one is set during an alien invasion. The devs have basically just thrown in whatever they've felt was cool, without any regard for realism or consistency, much in the same way devs did back in the 90's. This is also evident looking at the vehicle roster, which has everything from Cadillac convertibles and Nissan sportscars to tanks, choppers and friggin' dinosaurs.
It's got all your favourites. Everything from Corvette Stingrays to actual, literal fish.All of the cars...er, vehicles...er...things, can be customized using the experience points you earn for playing, and the cash you earn or find in bundles hidden throughout the tracks. New cars - I'm just gonna say cars, okay - can be unlocked by finding keys that are stashed away in the game's many hidden shortcuts and alternate paths. There are 23 cars in total, most of which are unlockables, which helps give the game some sort of feeling of progression that it's otherwise mostly lacking.
See, this is not a game you play for the progression, the completion or the community. If you're gonna play this, you're gonna have to play this for the sake of the arcade style racing, and when it comes the racing, Cruis'n Blast delivers an authentic turn of the millennium arcade experience, for better and for worse.
You've got your gas, you've got your breaks, you've got your drifting and your nitro blast, and that's about it. It's simple, but intuitive and responsive. The cars have an appropriate sense of weight and inertia for a game of this type, and it feels equally rewarding to tackle a car into the outdoor seating of a restaurant as it does to hit a jump and fly across blocks of houses while fireworks go off. It's not realistic in the slightest, but it's believable enough, if that makes sense. And it runs pretty well.
In England, they drive on the left hand side of the road. Also, when they hit a lamppost, they receive money. It's a fascinating place.The game runs at a (mostly) stable 60 frames per second in both handheld and docked mode, and it looks good in an ugly way. Or maybe it looks ugly in a good way. It looks sharp and the action is easy to read, but at the same time Cruis'n Blast is an orgy of color, flashy effects and excessive set piece elements. It's as if Raw Thrills went back in time and handed a Dreamcast dev modern workstations, but didn't give them any modern day knowledge to use, so the devs just used the exact same type of graphical effects they were used to, and turned them up to eleven.
Cruis'n Blast looks - and I mean this in the best possible way - like someone threw up a bag of radioactive skittles all over your screen.For example: Reflective surfaces are everywhere. The chrome on the cars reflects the sky and the wet cobble stones on the road reflect the neon signs, but it's all canned reflections. It's all clearly fake in a way that doesn't hold up against modern games, even those without ray tracing, but it's also flashy in all the ways we wanted games to be, a couple of decades ago. It's not impressive, it's not aesthetically pleasing, it's not...good... but it still feels good to look at, somehow.
If you're looking for the type of old school racing experience, where it's perfectly normal to drive a shark across a bridge that crumbles and has you fall down into a forgotten underworld, moments before you speed through the streets of London as the London Eye rolls back and forth across your path, and you're prepared to pay 20 bucks for it, this is for you. If you're feeling even the slightest sense of hesitation, you're probably better off just moving on with your life and playing Mario Kart or Forza Horizon or something. The world has moved on, and it's up to us if we want to join it. Raw Thrills have made their choice.
