Crash Drive 3 PC Review
Summary: An arcade style Crash'em'up. No thought... just drive, crash and drive again.
3
Middle of the Road
With a title like Crash Drive 3 you can tell from the get go that this is not going to be an intellectual outing and in many ways that’s essentially what you want here. The key idea is you drive around a play space and perform stunts, collect cash, upgrade and unlock cars and find secrets stashed around the landscapes. It features cross platform multiplayer so there’s a great chance there will be someone else you can challenge if you are up for some crazy fun.
Visually the game is sort of cartoony and the more I think about it… even the worlds make me think of the old Micro Machines mini play sets you used to be able to get (showing my age a bit here). This of course isn’t a Micro Machines game (though there have been branded games in the past)… but the feel is very much “play time”… ie it’s the kind of driving you might have done when you had your toy cars in the back yard or at a friends house. Insane stunts, wild locations and crazy challenges are what the game is all about and there is fun to be had… but I did feel it all started to feel quite repetitive quickly.
You start off in a desert landscape and are given a few tasks to get you going and familiar with the dynamics. Nothing it too taxing and there’s no real penalty if you need to be reset (such as if your car flips and can’t be righted). Ramps litter the landscape making it very clear you have some options to achieve air time and a giant arrow points you to the current challenge if you want to focus on that.
There are also some “key locations” on each map… billboards giving you information about different elements of the game (and in a pretty desperate ploy there is pandering to “like”/”follow” the game etc on social media… if you do you can get cash bonuses). Eventually you build up enough money to visit the garage and either enhance your ride or buy a new vehicle, there are a lot to unlock and each successive one will require more and more money and potentially other feats to be performed before you can grab them. After driving around for a while and hotting up your ride you eventually will be guided to go to a new location… through a tunnel to the forest. What seems like a new landscape soon seems very familiar albeit with a different skin on things. To be fair each level does have it’s “featured” set pieces and they can provide a bit of extra fun (the catapults being a good example). Later aspects of the landscape will have a big impact on how you drive… ie ice or low gravity.
Playing on your own can get repetitive pretty quickly so it’s nice to have some multiplayer focused action, specifically in the Tank Battle. I do have to admit I did enjoy the thrill of lining up a shot and blasting a competitor off the platform or being blown into the air only to land on the edge of the platform and manage to hold on and get back on to escape or return fire.
Ultimately the game is one I think best used as a time filler or a some time indulgence. You don’t need to memorise story elements or spend a long time remembering what the key combinations are… just drive and see how many times you can make your car spin in… well pretty much any and all directions. Not a lot of depth but I don’t think it ever really tried to be more than what it is… just a bit of silly fun. I’d probably wait for a sale but it’s not a bad price for something that can sit on your hard drive and provide a bit of fun when you’ve got nothing else to do.
About the Author
Chris O'Connor Father of four, husband of one and all round oddity. Gaming at home since about 1982 with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Moving on to the more traditional PC genre in the years that followed with the classic Jump Joe and Alley Cat. CGA, EGA, VGA and beyond PC's have been central to my gaming but I've also enjoyed consoles and hand helds along the way (who remembers the Atari Lynx?). Would have been actor/film maker, jack of many trades master of none.
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