What happened to parts 1 and 2?

Crash Drive 3 is a perfect example why I love having the opportunity to review video games. That is to say that this is a great game that I had not heard of before. Crash Drive 3 is a cross-platform (even SONY), open world, stunting playground. You can drive tanks, monster trucks, solar cars and more across huge open environments ranging from a medieval themed castle to the arctic and even the moon. Each environment is littered with hidden items, unlocks, and of course ramps, half-pipes and like in order for players to pull off those gnarly tricks.

Crash Drive 3’s core concept of pulling off tricks in a car, sounds so simple but the developers managed to pull it off masterfully. As I said you have an array of vehicles to choose from when cruising through each open world. The game begins with a tutorial that players can choose to follow or just start driving off on their own. I will say that while a lot of what the tutorial teaches is really common sense, it is worth it to complete it because it will still earn cash; which is used to unlock and upgrade the cars. I wasn’t penalized by stopping the tutorial step that I was on in order to complete an event (more on those later). Due to the game being open world I only ever saw a loading screen when switching areas, beyond that everything happened in real time.

MSRP: $19.99
Platforms: Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC, Mobile
Price I’d Pay: $19.99

I talked about earning cash, well the game doesn’t have any sort of microtransactions that I have found. Which in this day in age is rarer than finding a shiny Zapdos in Pokémon Silver; but I digress. So that means everything players unlock in game will have to be earned, but they will literally get cash (the in-game currency) for everything. Do a little drift, here’s some cash. Manage to jump this ramp and flip once…get some money buddy. So, with the game throwing money at me, I was able to afford to trick out my ride in no time. Now the big money lies in competing in events, which in Crash Drive 3 happen every 30 seconds. These range from stuff like who can damage a giant beachball the most as it bounces around the map to who can pull off tricks on the most objects around the map to King of the Hill matches where players have to smash their opponents out of the circle. There is literally ALWAYS something to do in this game, which was freaking awesome.

Now you got all this cash…what are you going spend it on? Well Crash Drive 3 has 47 different vehicles to purchase. All have varying cost, obviously getting more expensive the more exotic they go. In order to unlock cars, players will need to upgrade current ones. This means players will spend a certain amount of cash to upgrade the stats like acceleration, stability, etc. on older cars. Once I maxed out a vehicle’s upgrades I unlocked more cars to purchase and then started the process over again. Not only that, but I was able to purchase various antennas to adorn my car and different types of nitro blast. I could shoot out rainbows from my tailpipe as I whizzed by or even hearts and stars, clovers and blue moon…that’s a cereal commercial…. Well you get my point… the game has a lot of customization options for you to spend all that cash on.

But I hear you, “L0rd Magnus,” you’re saying “I don’t really wanna play with people, I just like to pull off my sweet tricks alone as I am not a braggart” Well then, my friend you are in for a treat as you can seamlessly switch to single player in Crash Drive 3. If I didn’t want to ever play online with anyone, the game didn’t force me to. I still got events every 30 seconds and earned cash for those events as well as pulling off tricks. In essence players get the exact same experience as the multiplayer just alone. Which again is something that you don’t see nowadays with so much co-op, multiplayer, battle royale, werewolf within type games. It really makes for a nice taste of how games were back in the day…and I just dated myself… oh well.

Let’s talk about some of my issues, for one, the camera can be…in a word nauseating at times. Depending on what kind of tricks I was doing or failing at as I adjusted the camera it some times would flip on its own and it was all very jarring. Never to the point where I was ready to throw a controller just a “hiccup” moment and I was back to having fun. The controls are also a little slippery, I know it’s an arcade-y game but even looking through that lens the controls are a bit much. Some of the events where I had to pick up coins, or the cops and robbers event where I picked up gold bars were harder because I fought with lining up the perfect approach. Nothing that can’t be addressed in a patch though, honestly this game gets so much stuff right that its very easy to overlook these little issues.

I honestly loved this game more than I thought I would. I’m not a huge fan of racing games or anything but much like Tony Hawk’s games this one just did something for me. The fun of pulling off tricks, or trying to keep my multiplayer high and see how many flips I can do before I hit the ground took me back to those days of trying to beat my little brothers score in Tony Hawk 2. Admittedly I prefer multiplayer, being able to put my skills against other people is fun to me, but as I said if you don’t enjoy other people the single player gives you the same experience with none of the folks. Crash Drive 3 is a lot of fun, it’s a great game to pick up have a little fun and move on till next time, but if you choose to stay longer you’ll find a ton of stuff to unlock and secrets to chase that will keep you busy for quite a while.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.