PRODUCED BY: Naughty Dog / Universal Interactive Studios
DEVELOPED BY: Naughty Dog
GENRE: Racing
PLATFORM: PlayStation
YEAR OF RELEASE: 1999

As a clone of Mario, Crash really needed to have his racing game... Well, there is some bad news on Crash Team Racing: this was the last game of the Crash series to be produced and developed by Naughty Dog. But ND made their last game with style (well, in a kind of way). See below...

STORY - 9.5
CTR's story is the classic case of "An evil force plans to enslave and destroy the whole planet, and the good guys must enter in a competition to make everything be fine again." A great kart race is going to take place on the Wumpa Islands, but an alien named Nitros Oxide plans to destroy the Earth using a "game" named "Survival of the Fastest" as pretext. The rules: he races against the best drivers on our planet. If they win, he'll leave the planet to nevermore come back, but if he wins, he's going to turn the entire planet into a concrete parking lot, and all of us into his slaves. So, Crash and his gang must race for the fate of the planet.

GAMEPLAY - 7
EVERY SINGLE ITEM is a recreation of the Mario Kart series (obviously). For example, the masks of Aku Aku and Uka Uka grant temporary invencibility like the Power Stars; all the projectiles are remodels of the shells, and so on. The only new things are the Wumpa fruit story: if you collect and keep 10, your weapons will be more potent. Also, in the Adventure Mode, you can choose among Crash, Dr. Cortex, N. Gin, Polar, Pura, Tiny Tiger, Dingodile (I didn't mention him in my last Review, he is a weird mixture of a dingo and a crocodile), and Coco to play. The bosses (with the exception of Oxide) can be unlocked by winning the Gem Cups, and every single level (with the exception of the Gem Cups and the tracks "Slide Coliseum" and "Turbo Track") can be completed to win trophies, CTR tokens, and relics, like in "Warped". To win a CTR token, you must find the letters C, T, and R on each track and finish in first place. This can be frustrating sometimes, most specifically in the track "Papu's Pyramid". Personally, I find collecting relics to be a very easy process in this game, unlike in "Warped". Also, a good point: the epilogue telling what happened to each character at the end of the game's events comes back, (a thing we haven't see since Crash 1).

MUSIC - 9
Okay, the music remains good as in the previous games (and, as you must have guessed, it was made once more by the band Mutato Muzika, formed by Mark Mothersbaugh and Josh Mancell), but ND exaggerated in the ambient sounds, and the music is almost impossible to hear (unless you cancel the sound, of course, or download it from YouTube, as I do). My favorite one is the "Dragon Mines" track.

GRAPHICS - 9.5
Yes, once more the graphics are marvelous. Well, with the exceptions of the in-kart characters; they look like still-faced living toys. In the podium cutscenes, when they are outside the karts, they are bigger and better.

FUN FACTOR! - 8
Okay, some tracks can be very interesting, and it´s always nice hearing the players' laughs. My favorite one is Ripper Roo's. But some other tracks can be very frustrating. "Oxide Station" is a good one; but on the extra tracks, you must collect 20 crystals before time runs out. I took ages to beat those!

FINAL NOTE - 9
CTR, like every other game (being a Crash one or not), has its failures. But Naughty Dog stylized the last game of theirs very much for the fans' likes. Maybe, in the very distant future, Naughty Dog will make more Crash games again... But you might be curious to know what happened to ND before they left Crash. They made a new game series for the PlayStation 2: "Jak and Daxter", composed of Jak 1, 2, 3, and X, a racing game. Then, they made "Uncharted: Drake´s Fortune" for the PS3, their most recent game (2007, baby!). Nonetheless, almost everybody wants them to do Crash again, but we only have to trust in fate for this to happen.

BE PREPARED FOR MY NEXT REVIEW:
Crash Bash

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