A Review: Crusi'n Exotica, N64 2000

Cruis'n Exotica is a 1999 racing game developed for arcades by Midway Games. The game is a sequel to Cruis'n World and is the third entry in the Cruis'n series. It was ported by Gratuitous Games and released on the Nintendo 64 in 2000, along with a Game Boy Colour version developed by Crawfish Interactive.
I wasn't that impressed by this game, really, nor did I think that it was all that bad. It was just another one of the many arcade games that seemed to be ported to home consoles for no reason. It suffered from mediocrity in every sense of the word and just couldn't quite rise above the average soup that this series seemed to swim in. The controls are twitchy and hard to get to grips with, but once you get the hang of things, it reduces play down to basic, boring, and repetitive racing. There is little in the way of content, and a complete playthrough can be done in under six hours, with breaks. The cars slop all over the track or seem to stick better than gum to a shoe. The AI is more of an annoyance than a challenge and seems to be there to populate the tracks rather than leaving them bare. I did enjoy the pacing of the races when everything just worked, but I found that those moments were few and far between. 

 

Visually, you could just tell that this game used to be on sit-in arcade units; everything seems to jump off the screen and assault the player's eyes with garish colours and over-the-top effects. The backgrounds go from reasonably nice to in your face in the course of a track change. The perspective is sometimes off, and it looks like things are much further away from you than they actually are. The render distance is so short that it seems the tracks just drop off past a certain point, and the world objects and environments are basic and repetitive. The car models aren't too bad and look okay, but that is about it really; everything is just mediocre and 'meh', for lack of a better word. 


Overall, this is an okay way to spend a few hours or to maybe mess around with a friend on, but that's about it. There isn't enough to this game to warrant a lot of effort, and the rewards for doing so are, in my opinion, hardly worth it.


5/10 – Okay!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ

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