Gives a sense of classic arcade racing but it's a bit too classic.
The game has you running racing around in various missions designed to solve various mysteries. The only problem is that you don't "solve" any of them. You must do pre-determined racing acts that all tend to repeat themselves in various manners. Sometimes you have to perform PIT maneuvers on criminals, other times you may have to damage them. In other missions, you may have to shadow a driver. None of the missions are challenging even though you can choose from three difficulties. The missions can be summed up as "trial and error."
The game, being titled as it is, strangely limits your "crash time" in certain missions. Sometimes you can only take 30% damage. At higher difficulties, that damage limit decreases. To make things even stranger, your characters are law enforcement officers which makes the notion of crashing for the fun of it a little ungainly.
What can make the missions even worse is the horrific voice acting. Between missions, you have to hear dialogue between different, faceless characters of the game in order to progress the "mysteries" of each mission. The characters do not have familiar names either. Most of them are European names that simply do not translate well in the States.
Controls in the game are a bit confusing at first. If you're familiar with the current standard of racing games, most controls are within the same vicinity; that's not the case with this game. R trigger is your acceleration and L trigger is your brake but because of added features such as a siren for the X button, some actions can be difficult to perform. Don't even bother with using manual in this game since you have to spend so much time dodging the cars on the road, you'll be up and down on the gearing.
The HUD for the game is either too intrusive or it's not useful enough. The speedometer, which can be read in MPH or KM/h, sometimes looks like a steering radius as your speed can drastically from dodging cars and it seems like the speedometer rolls with you. The radar is the least useful since it zooms in and out as you move closer or further from your target. When it's zoomed out, it's virtually useless as everything is too small and it's difficult to spot the green dot traveling on the road.
If there is any redeeming quality about this game, it is the crashing and the freedom in the world. While the game does not measure to Burnout standards, bashing into cars at top speeds and seeing tankers explode is always fun times. Sometimes, when you're going to fast, you might actually jump a guardrail and interestingly enough, you car can still roam around. In certain missions, you'll be forced to get back on the road but in others, it's safe to drive around and bust up your car, or others. In fact, there's a ton of traffic in this game. If there's one thing that you feel like, you will feel like you're actually on a crowded freeway.
Beyond crashing, there's nothing to look at. The graphics in this game are way under the standard of gaming--paintjobs are plain, car variations are simple and the landscape and buildings are not appealing.
The sound is not bad. There's nothing glaring about it. Crashes sound like crashes, screeching tires sound like screeching tires, horns sound like horns, etc. There's a lot of customization with the sound options so if the sound is too hot, you can turn it down. If you don't like all the ambient noise, you can turn that down too.
Rent the game or play the demo. In either case, Crash Time will be pure classic entertainment that does not meet today's standard of gaming.