I’m a happy gamer that doesn’t need much to get some satisfaction and enjoyment out of a video game. However on a few occasions I can have a viscerally negative reaction to a game and Crashy Laps is sadly one suck game. It is a 1-4 player single screen racing game that places you into 20 tracks for 4 lap races that hardly ever break the two minute length. Yet I’ve not played a racing game so unsatisfying and frustrating in its moment to moment gameplay in ages.
The best feature is that Crashy Laps lets you race from an isometric or top down perspective. I really like this idea as some younger gamers don’t seem to take to isometric racing whereas older duffers like me have played it for years and can deal with reverse controls when driving down a screen naturally. Along with time trials having online leaderboards and fastest sector splits, they are great things other racing games should consider. The good news stops there though.
My frustrations with Crashy Laps boil down to three compounding issues – track design, car handling and to a lesser extent the AI racing. Tracks are narrow, where its tricky to get two cars alongside each other at the best of times. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if the cars handled predictably and well but they don’t. They are incredibly susceptible to gradient, bumps and camber in the road and guess what almost every track has to offer? Gradient, bumps and camber. Almost every corner is part rollercoaster in the latter half of the games championship mode, designed to spit you off the track or clonk a jagged barrier that you can’t quite see the end of due to the viewing angles. You simply can’t pass most of the time and are rewarded by smashing into everyone and hoping they’ll crash out. The problem there is that you lock wheels and both of you end up in the wall and respawning in the middle of track no better off. Worse still, if you face the wrong way you’ll need to do an incredibly slow turn as there is no reverse or quick respawn.
Turning is slow at all times because the handling is like driving a heavy F1 car around a supermarket. The slow acceleration early on is a little painful but the tracks are twisty so you never reach top speed. If you do, you’ll need to brake and you can’t brake and turn at the same time – you just skid off. This means half way down a straight you’ll be off the accelerator, pumping the brake and also the steering because you can’t take corners smoothly either as you’ll spin drift to a halt. That’s where the painfully slow early acceleration kills any recovery and you are left open to AI that just smash into you like you don’t exist. The AI are annoying not because of that issue but because sometimes they can’t get around two laps without clipping walls or getting stuck themselves. They are quite fast in some areas but can’t race each other, you or deal with long turns – only hairpins.
This, as you can imagine is a recipe for high blood pressure and rage. I had next to no fun playing any of this game as its frustrating, inconsistent and difficult to know if its you, the game or both that’s making it so painstakingly annoying to play. If you are buying it purely for multiplayer, beware that you’ll need about 2 hours to unlock all the tracks as you’ll have to race time trial on all of them for four laps each to unlock them elsewhere and win their corresponding championships on three difficulties to unlock all 20. The game says each track has four variants but its a day/afternoon/evening/night version of each with no on track changes.
It isn’t often I say this – especially on a racing game – but this is an undrivable car crash. I cannot recommend this game to any racing fan and although I can imagine it might be more paletteable in 4 player local racing, everything in this game is designed to annoy you rather than flow so I can’t see many gamers enjoying it from that perspective either. A shame.
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