![]() In a year that has seen so many fun but niche live-service games disappear, I worry Crash Team Rumble's June 20 debut could be just a year or two away from its eventual closure. Unlike so many other games with similar economies, CTR isn't free-to-play. With a battle pass system confirmed and an in-game shop seeming likely, CTR will need to lean into its unique matches to find an audience and keep them spending. ![]() A single beta weekend isn't enough to tell me if the game holds up over the long haul, so I'm not comfortable crowning it quite yet. It's not a sport, but it's very sporty, and though Rocket League is the standard-bearer in that space, Crash Team Rumble is a game I'll gladly try again when it arrives later this year. There's a novelty there that I find exciting, and my feeling is the rules and mechanics give Crash Team Rumble an appeal akin to Rocket League. This gives each round a sense of familiarity, but the chaotic pace and the wide arenas, each with clever elements of verticality on display, make it feel like a classic single-player Crash level has been invaded by other players. ![]() Jumping, spinning, and ground-pounding are available in every character's repertoire, and they're mapped to the controller just as any series veteran would expect. The winning team will usually be the one that displays better teamwork. It's a refreshing way to view a character who I've already seen in many different contexts over the past 20+ years. Crash's true platformers feature some famously hard levels, but here the difficulty comes not so much in the platforming, but in the execution of a team's gameplan. You can feasibly finish a round without ever using any bonus weapons like these, but the winners will often be those who not only did utilize them, but did so thoughtfully. Deployable traps such as potted plants that behave as turret guns and unlockable weapons like a spiked hamster ball that lets you move faster and damage enemies are there for the taking, but each ability unlock takes concerted effort, asking you to collect relics rather than fruit. If you're not directly scoring or defending, you're likely working to buff your scorers with multipliers or unlocking abilities scattered around the map. And yet, I saw a handful of moments where rivals got so caught up in eliminating each other that they took their eyes off the ball-er, wumpa. Do you drop your scoring chance to aid a teammate out of a jam? Do they even want you to? You can hit enemies and they'll drop some fruit, or you can even knock enemies out temporarily and they'll lose everything, but the time-to-kill (which feels like an extreme phrase here, I admit) is very long. It's a game that is best played with a communicative team, as the arena maps will, at any one time, host several skirmishes in different areas. Learning when to push on offense and when to hang back and keep enemies from scoring is a fun hurdle in the game's first few hours. It's a quasi-arcade sport, so standing in your way will be the enemy team who has the same objective as you-hit the score ceiling first-giving each round a Capture The Flag tempo. In a good round, it'll never be as simple as moving your wumpas to the goal. This basic setup makes CTR (no, not that CTR) easy to pick up, and from there, each additional layer adds to its subtly smart design. ![]() You'll take your amassed wumpa fruit to the goal and, after a short but deliberate delay, tally the points. ![]() Each map is shaped by the series' history and aesthetic and features goal platforms. You'll collect them like pick-ups spinning in place or bunched inside crates just like the platformers have long featured, only here they don't net you extra lives instead, they score points for your team. In the beta, only a small subset of the game's full list of heroes and villains-and their customizable abilities-was available, but it gave me an idea of what to expect. Similar to something like Overwatch, the full game will offer multiple characters in each class, with heroes and villains spanning all of Crash's history on the roster. Players will load into matches cast as familiar characters split into one of several classes, like scorers, defenders, and more. ![]()
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