Crash Team Rumble does away with the good vs evil mentality and replaces it with red team vs blue team in a multiplayer-focused game where the goal is to collect more Wumpa Fruit than the opposing team by having the heroes and villains settle their differences in the name of co-operation.
Honestly, I expected it to be a rubbish cash-grab exploiting the Crash Bandicoot brand for a quick buck with a sub-par spin-off party game. Oh, how wrong was I...
After a weekend of play, I'm sold on it, and that's in no small part due to the simplicity. It's not a hard game to get your head around, and once you've got a few practice matches under your belt and have a feel for the rhythm of play, it's really good fun. Frustrating at times, sure, as most multiplayer-centric games tend to be, but fun nonetheless.
The final game that releases this summer will include a few different game modes and many more maps and characters. The closed beta that I was involved in had just one game mode, three maps, and a handful of characters. Each character plays a role, and roles are important in Crash Team Rumble.
There are three roles: Scorers, Blockers, and Boosters, and each carries a vital responsibility. The beauty is, though, that the game doesn’t force anybody to play a particular role. Teams are split into two sets of four players, and you could, theoretically, have four of any role on a team, though that would create a massive imbalance. Thankfully, in the games I played, there was typically at least one of each role, with one being doubled.
Characters such as Crash and Tawna are Scorers. They’re well-balanced, but their main job is to collect as many Wumpa Fruit as possible and bring them back to your team’s base bank. The first team to reach 2,000 Wumpa in the bank wins. Simple enough. Blockers, like Dingodile, are brutish characters who, as the role suggests, are best used to block opposing players from dumping their fruit for points. Dingodile's slow speed means he's not the best at running up a decent tally, and he's best used to harass the other team or defend a base. Boosters, on the other hand, play a more indirect role by being quick and nimble across the game map. With increased speed, they’re perfectly suited to darting around and picking up Relics, which in turn can be used for team-wide powerups. They’re also useful for activating bonus Gems, which boost your team’s score, helping to give an edge that could make all the difference in a tightly contested match.
Each role has its pros and cons, and I found it to be fairly well-balanced. I was rarely left frustrated and feeling hard done by due to the character mix. Though in one match I played, my team managed to win without letting the other team score a single point; we had two Blockers on our team, and they basically parked themselves in front of the other team’s base bank and stopped any and all attempts to score points. I imagine those players were, let’s say, miffed…
Despite it being a competitive team-based game with some light combat — each character has a few standard moves to help defend or attack — the goal isn't to rack up a kill count for bragging rights. It's purely a score-based game, and those who roll solo with the intention of just getting kills will find themselves on the losing side more often than not. I saw it firsthand from both sides, and I also saw the behavior change once those players realized victory comes via teamwork.
It's early days yet, and there's plenty more to see, from alternate game modes, various maps with differing levels of danger, and of course, a cast of characters that have not yet been fully revealed. While I've only seen a small slice of what is sure to be a bigger pie, I'm cautiously optimistic, and that's saying something, because I typically couldn't give a toot for a game where my fun is dictated by others.