Cruis’n Blast review: the fast and furious video game we always wanted

A cherry red Corvette Stingray goes through a Los Angeles street race when, with little warning and a lot of noise, a shower of missiles pulverizes the road, clouding the air with dust and fire. The vapor trail leads to a squad of attack helicopters hovering in front of the California sun. It’s an ambush. The Corvette swerves to evade its pursuers, but the road is congested by a trio of 18-wheelers carrying huge platinum tanks filled with, what else, gasoline.

Click! A missile is launched from a helicopter and then accelerates towards the nearest semi-trailer. The driver of the Stingray steps on the gas, opens a can of nitrous and, defying physics, flings the vehicle into the air, performing a barrel turn inches from the explosion and to safety.

Thank you for attending my dramatic reenactment of my first 20 seconds of an early career in Cruis’n Blast, one of the loveliest and messiest games ever released on the Nintendo Switch this year.

If you’ve ever visited a musky bar in a small town or a Holiday Inn game room, you’ve probably come across the first entry in the Cruis’n franchise, the 1994 arcade classic. Cruise’n USA. The affinity for the series waned with each subsequent entry, before falling into obscurity with 2001. Cruising speed. Despite the closure of Midway, the arcade publisher, and the death of nearly every arcade in America, the creators of Cruis’n never stopped stepping on the gas. Series creator Eugene Jarvis (Defender, Robotron: 2084) founded Raw Thrills, a bluntly named arcade game developer who has been quietly producing a game for a year since 2004. He’s responsible for familiar stuff, like entries in the Big Buck Hunter series, and some not-so-familiar stuff, like arcade adaptations. from movies like Cars and Alien: Covenant. And in 2017, along with the sequels and marketing links, the studio managed to produce the first Cruis’n game in more than a decade. Cruis’n Blast.

Okay, let’s pause for a moment because you should see me win a race before continuing. Here’s a quick video:

As you can see, Explosion it is almost identical in structure to its predecessors. The goal is to be the first to cross the finish line at the end of a straight track that weaves its way through increasingly comical settings. In addition to speeding up and breaking, Blast adds the ability to drift and boost Mario Kart-style. You can upgrade your car, buy nitrous, and crash enemies, but the only real challenge is staying on the road.

Now you can play Explosion without shoving chips into an eye-catching arcade cabinet, thanks to a sturdy port for Nintendo Switch. The good news is that the port is cheaper than buying an arcade cabinet and includes some new cars, modes, and tracks. The bad news: It’ll cost you $ 39.99 for a racing game with just five locations and graphics that would have looked state-of-the-art during the Clinton presidency. I completed the entire campaign and unlocked most of the vehicles during my flight from Los Angeles to Detroit with a stopover in Dallas.

For one thing, it’s a short time to see most of what any racing game has to offer. On the other hand, I experienced the best air travel day in human history. Reader, this video game rules.

If my intro sounded like a synopsis for a Fast and Furious set, it’s because developer Raw Thrills has produced four Fast and Furious arcade games. They clearly learned from experience. The first half of the game is set as an unofficial spinoff of the movies, replete with nightly street races in international cities and police chases on tropical islands.

And yet these introductory courses are quite moderate compared to the later half of the game. After my Stingray escaped from Los Angeles, it became earthquake, under UFO and away from dinosaurs. In the end credits, I had been granted the freedom to drive said UFOs and dinosaurs. Yes, plural. So far, I have unlocked several cars, trucks, and motorcycles, along with a helicopter, flying saucer, triceratops, and unicorn.

Does a silly helicopter look when it performs a nitrous backflip while racing cars through a cavern of ice hit by yetis the size of the Statue of Liberty? Yes! That is the point! If this game had been produced by a small indie game creator as a loving ode to a dead series, I really think we would be praising DIY borderline images as daring, weird, and psychedelic. I think Raw Thrills, even with its pedigree, deserves a similar benefit of the doubt, that the rough edges of the game are somehow an intentional choice. A vibe.

Cruis’n Blast it borrows a lot from movies like the Fast and Furious franchise. But as those movies get higher budgets and more polished visuals, their creators could learn from a game like Cruis’n Blast: Too polished can hide all the fun.

Cruis’n Blast was released on September 14 on Nintendo Switch. The game was reviewed on Switch using a retail download code provided by Raw Thrills. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.