During the 1990’s, every company was trying to compete with Nintendo’s Mario Kart games. There were more Mario Kart clones than you could remember, but most of them failed to capture its magic. Crash Team Racing on PS1 was Sony’s answer to Mario Kart, and for most fans, it did well. All these years later (and after it became third-party) we now have a remake of the game. But what did I think of it?

The game has a story where some alien challenges everyone in Crash Bandicoot’s universe to a go-kart race. If the beings of this world win, everything will be saved, if not, then everyone is doomed. You’d think alien creatures would be more highly evolved than to settle matters with racing gasoline-powered vehicles.

There is a campaign to the story mode where you go from station to station, racing tracks and trying to become number one. Except, even on “easy”, you can still easily lose in the game. It doesn’t help matters that the story mode has a low tolerance for failure. Coming in 2nd place isn’t much better than coming in dead last.

But luckily (unlike the days of the original PlayStation) there is a online mode. So even if you don’t have friends to race locally, you can battle strangers online. I will say, the way CTR plays is much different than Mario Kart. In the Nintendo series, items can help stop a player from being number one. In the Crash Bandicoot racing game, items barely help at all. I might just be awful at the game, but every race, at least two people have an insane and uncatchable lead.

So overall, I was a not a fan of the game at all. The tracks are its biggest strength, but its gameplay is unforgiving and aged. There is drifting to the racing, but I thought it was the worst I had ever seen in a racing game. I never played the original game on PS1, so I didn’t have any nostalgia for it. The game to me is as appealing as a bag of chips left open since 1999.

Score: C