Crash Nitro Kart just doesn't capture the same great style as Crash Team Racing did.
User Rating: 5.4 | Crash Nitro Kart PS2
Crash Team Racing for the PS1 was an instant classic, with it's funny characters and enjoyable settings, so I was looking forward to playing this follow on for the PS2, how sadly disappointed I was. The premise for CNK is almost identical to CTR. An evil alien is trying to take over Earth so Crash, Cortex and their buddies must race in a championship to stop this happening. This basically involves placing first in each race to earn a trophy and to progress to the next area. This is annoying in itself, as it seems the A.I is racing for the sole intention of making you lose. As soon as you even seem to be coming first, they fire everything they have at you and in a split second, you can be down to last place again. A new thing implenented into CNK is the inclusion of "teams" which basically means that if you drive close enough to your buddy, a bar will fill up, when it's full you can use as many weapons as you see fit for a certain amount of time. This is pointless though, as the weapons are chosen at random, and most likely are useless in your situation anyway. After gaining enough trophies, you must race a boss before proceeding any further. This is just like any other race, except the opponent is incredibly cheap, tossing all manner of things at you, sometimes he'll even have little helpers to further annoy you. After beating the final boss you can go back to any race and try to earn relics, by finishing the race as fast as possible, or earn CNK tokens. If you choose the latter, you must race again, but at the same time find the letters C,N and K hidden in each area, and boy are they hidden. Some are so hidden that you'll spend the majority of the race just looking for them. The REALLY bad thing about this is you still have to place first to win. After a while you won't bother doing this anymore and look elsewhere. The multiplayer aspect is also boring, with a simple race or battle option to choose from. Sadly, this has been done before, and it's been done better than this. The graphics are average to say the least, and even seem worse when compared to CTR's graphics, which is quite shocking. The voice acting is annoying at most times and not very well done, by the end of it all you'll want to grab Coco around the neck. There are just too many other good kart games out thare at this time, at the most, Crash Nitro Kart is good for a rental for a couple of nights, but not much more than that.
