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Crash Drive 2 (Switch) Review

by Melanie Zawodniak - February 14, 2020, 6:31 pm EST
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5

Crash and Burn Drive

Crash Drive 2 is an arcade driving game reminiscent of the Tony Hawk games. You’re dropped into an open map with various obstacles, objects, and ramps to launch off of and do tricks, but this time you’re driving cars instead of riding a skateboard. As a port of a mobile game, it’s a bit light in terms of what you can do—the tricks are limited to just launching into the air and spinning around as much as you can—but it can be a decent time-waster if you’ve just trying to fill a few minutes.

While you’re driving around the map doing tricks, events will periodically pop-up for you to participate in against other players online. They’re pretty basic things like get the most points, tag the most objects with tricks, or participate in the occasional race. The most impressive thing about the multiplayer is that it appears to have full cross-play; at least I assume that’s why so many players online are named “[Person]’s iPad”. I never found the events to be very interesting, but they’re a required part of the game’s progression, so I didn’t have much of a choice but to sit through them to unlock everything.

Speaking of progression, there are a lot of vehicles to unlock and choose from, though I never bothered to use most of them. The game starts you out with a sizeable chunk of change that I used to instantly max out the stats of one of the starter vehicles, and I enjoyed using that car for my entire time with the game. It felt necessary to upgrade my stats immediately, since it’s tough to compete in events—especially races—against players with better cars than you. There are thirty unique cars, however, and the few that I tried all handled differently, so someone more interested in unlocking the full fleet will have a lot of potential playtime to look forward to.

There are five different maps to play on, all of which must be unlocked after the starter course. The first four are just different themes and obstacle layouts, but the fifth is an entirely new separate game mode where you fight other players with tanks. Rather than players having health, they’ll be knocked around by cannon fire, and points are scored by knocking other players off the stage. Unfortunately this mode is only available on the one map, and the layout was too cramped for my tastes, so I felt like the time I spent grinding out events to unlock that map was a waste.

Crash Drive 2 is a decent game that doesn’t exceed at anything in particular. The fundamentals are all there, like good controls and a lot of goals to work towards, but the gameplay loop is just too simple to be worth more than a few minutes of play at a time. If you just want something to play while you’re waiting for the bus then you could do worse, but it’s worth noting that the mobile version of the game is free on both iOS and Android. The game fits into the short-bursts niche that mobile gaming has carved out for itself, so perhaps it’s best to pass on the Switch version; after all, you can’t beat free.

Summary

Pros
  • A lot of unlockable content
  • Full cross-play
Cons
  • Grinding events to unlock maps doesn’t feel worth it
  • Tank battles are disappointing

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Switch

Game Profile

Genre Racing
Developer
Players1 - 8

Worldwide Releases

na: Crash Drive 2
Release Feb 07, 2020
RatingEveryone

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