Cruis’n Blast Review: An Enjoyable Arcade Racer With A Few Flaws

While Forza Horizon is the pinnacle of arcade-style racing to many, Cruis’n Blast feels like a jolt of electricity. Developed by Raw Thrills and released exclusively on Nintendo Switch, this colorful car game is a return to the classic Nintendo 64 trilogy and a fine port of the 2016 arcade cabinet that shares its name. Featuring the five original arcade tracks as well as a robust set of cups and tons of unlockable vehicles, Cruis’n Blast does a lot to capture the retro thrills of racers gone by.

Players start by picking their vehicle, with choices ranging from famous licensed cars to attack helicopters and firetrucks. The stats between them vary slightly, but only really come into play on higher difficulties. Instead, success in Cruis’n Blast comes from hitting jumps, drifts, and boost pads scattered around the track. It’s a faster game than most modern racers, tempered slightly by extremely loose handling that is still somehow an improvement over previous Cruis’n titles. It all feels designed around having fun first, with competition fading into the background, although players will still have to earn victory at harder difficulties.

One of Cruis’n Blast‘s distinctive features is how varied races can feel depending on the difficulty level. On easy, it’s almost impossible to place outside the podium without serious effort, but earning that same success on normal requires skillfully timed boosts and aggressive play. It’s great to have such a wide range of challenges to overcome, but Cruis’n Blast doesn’t feel like a game worth mastering. It’s supremely enjoyable to go through these over-the-top tracks and pull backflips and wheelies whenever possible, but that style of gameplay values style over substance. It’s easy to feel the AI letting off the pedal based on the player’s difficulty choice, and that robs the game of the satisfying challenge that comes in more balanced arcade racers like Burnout 3: Takedown.

Speaking of Burnout, Cruis’n Blast is the first game in a long while to use that game’s takedown system to great effect. Slamming into rivals and forcing them to crash sends them careening through the air in slow-motion glory. It’s an amazing addition to an otherwise straightforward arcade racer, but it’s more of a flourish than a meaningful part of the races. It can earn drivers a few more bits of currency to spend on cosmetics and extra boosts, but it’s usually just as easy to zoom past rivals as it is to slam them against the guard rail. It’s a shame that the campaign couldn’t incorporate some sort of variety between races using takedowns or some sort of Tony Hawk-esque trick system, but that might be asking too much considering how similar some of the tracks are by the end of the game.

Although the listing of “almost 30” tracks on Cruis’n Blast‘s store page might seem impressive at first, the number is inflated at best. Most racing games utilize mirror mode courses and similar themes to reuse sections of track in a way that feels fresh in the end. Cruis’n Blast attempts to do something similar but ends up leaning too far into reusing content. The last two cups in the game are dedicated to injecting prehistoric creatures and UFOs into tracks that otherwise feel almost identical to earlier ones, and there are several other redos hidden among the rest. It makes the campaign mode best in short bursts, and mixing Cadillacs and dinosaurs is certainly a winner, but longer sessions can begin to drag due to how much of Blast starts looking familiar after just a handful of hours.

With these lower expectations in mind, it’s still worth praising how much Cruis’n Blast gets right. The graphics are colorful and varied, and the bite-sized tracks feel perfect for playing on the go. Watching a fire truck spin through the air as it descends into a cave full of crystals and lands atop a rival convertible makes a lot of the game’s faults melt away, and the variety of unlockable content makes replaying stages with different vehicles fun rather than frustrating. The menu even has a new iteration of the Cruis’n theme song that lodges itself in the memory for hours after the console switches off.

For all its faults, Cruis’n Blast does a great job of capturing the style of its ’90s predecessors. Throughout its various cups and in multiplayer, there’s a lot of arcade fun that’s a welcome break for anyone tired of Mario Kart 8. It’s easy to wish that more time went into having a variety of modes rather than tracks that can feel too similar to stand out, and the graphics certainly aren’t hiding the fact that this game was first released five years ago. Still, anyone looking to relive the days of Cruis’n USA will find a lot to like by taking a whirlwind tour of what Blast has to offer.

Cruis’n Blast releases today, September 14, 2021, for Nintendo Switch. Screen Rant was provided with a digital Switch code for the purpose of this review.

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