Crash 'n' Burn Turbo Review

Costas Stephanides ’s Review

A cross between Micro Machines and Demolition Derby.

Crash 'n' Burn Turbo follows the usual formula. It is all about competing in a whole load of tournaments. After you win each tournament a new one is unlocked together with a whole bunch of courses. Towards the end of the game, he new courses arre actually the reverse of the existing ones, which helps to confuse even more.

At the start of the game you get to choose your car model and colour. Unfortunately, that's as far as the customisation goes. Each car is as powerful as the others and all have the same amount of nitro. This game is all about the race and not any fancy car features.

Before each race, the camera pans round so get an idea of the course. Very important as there is no course map. The courses are viewed from above and have very similar background graphics. The graphics are ok, nothing too advanced but the size of the game makes up for this. Although I was disappointed when the Las Vegas course looked exactly the same as all the other courses. Why bother with the fancy names?

The courses are littered with debris which you should try to avoid. Each course also has a number of jumps. Some of these can help you leap over some of the rubbish (and your opponents) whereas others can send you crashing into a wall. This is bad. All the cars have a damage meter and naturally the more damage you take, the slower your car runs until you blow up. One good thing is that your opponents also suffer from this. With a little bit of tactical bumping, you can glide a big bit of debris into their path and watch them smash it into little pieces and blow themselves up.

The other meter relates to your nitro. It does act as a handy boost but try not to waste it in mid-air. You don't get much and on a long course it could be vital. The on screen displays can be switched off which does improve the speed of the game.

Each course has its own lap record and race record. On top of that, each tournament also has an overall time record. So there is plenty of records to smash, if you are that way inclined.

To complete the game will take you many hours just based on its size and you probably wont win every race first time. Once you have unlocked all the championships its time to break a few records.

While I did thoroughly enjoy playing Crash 'n' Burn Turbo, it is debatable whether this is the best racing game out there, but there are definitely some shockingly poor car games to which this bears no comparision.