🏁🏎️💨 Cruis’n Blast | Nintendo Switch | Review | 7.5/10 | "I Have Very Fond Memories of The Cruis’n Series" 🏁🏎️💨 @rawthrills

I have very fond memories of the Cruis’n series, both in terms of the original arcade versions and homeports – well, some of them.

Originally released in 1994, the first game in the series – Cruis’n USA – was a fixture in a lot of arcades I visited in my teens and I was instantly drawn to the twitchy handling, energetic music and pure arcade gameplay.

The home ports were decent and got better with each iteration, meaning that Cruis’n Exotica was the highlight for me, despite the pop-in, smoothness always wins the day!

Following the N64 releases, I moved away from the series for the GBA and Wii versions and – until recently, I hadn’t thought about the series in a while. I was in an arcade near to my home about six months ago when I saw the 2017 arcade cabinet for Cruis’n Blast. I didn’t play it as I had my baby with me who was only a couple of weeks old, but I did get lost for a minute as I stood there watching the attract screen, remembering how much fun I had with racing games on the N64 such as Cruis’n, San Francisco Rush and the like.

There really was something about those games that tickled my passport and complimented my trousers. A few weeks later, I discovered that Cruis’n Blast was headed for the Switch and I was absolutely delighted, having spent a full day recently setting up my N64 and getting back into those classic racers of yore. 

From the title screen, the scene is set. Vivid colours splash across the screen as a woman sings “cruuuuuuuuuis’n!!!” with gusto, over and over. Good. There are several modes to get into, and whilst there are no online modes, you can play the usual single races, tournaments and local multiplayer (up to four players).

The absolute keyword here is ‘fun’. Fully embracing the games’ arcade roots, the tracks are all pretty much under two minutes in length and throw everything at you from enormous monsters smashing up the track to earthquakes, UFO attacks and explosions. Every track has at least one over-the-top set piece that sends you flying an impossible distance through some total carnage. Again, good.

Running at a smooth 60fps, whilst the game does dip on occasion, it’s always when there’s something insane going on visually and so it almost feels like a filmic fraction of slow-motion and so never interrupts the action or feels jarring. In terms of the music, it’s just bottled sunshine with high-octane tracks breezing along with the same toothy grin as the gameplay. It feels wonderfully brash and silly, which absolutely matches the impossibly shiny cars, vivid visuals and yes...that fantastically twitchy gameplay.

Any collisions in the game either see you spinning out of control momentarily or destroying the other car, the style of racing is Ridge Racer-esque (or Super Hang-On, if you like) in that all the cars pull away from you at the start of the race and you catch up to them throughout the track, as opposed to being a tightly-packed battler like the recent Hotshot Racing.

In the main single-player mode, there are over twenty cars to unlock -naturally, some are totally preposterous – and various upgrades as well as myriad hidden keys and shortcuts on each map. It’s always a joy to sit back and (Cruis’n) blast through a few races.