So I Tried... Crash Time II

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never tried before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. I went for the PC version of Crash Time II.

What I thought it was

From the video, an open world game where you do various tasks in a largely-destructible environment! There’s something about catching criminals, but come on there’s an articulated lorry chasing a guy on a go-kart! Crash, smash, boom!

What it actually is

A cop game. I’d not come across this series before now, so the video made it look amazing. I was a big fan of Destruction Derby II when my brother bought it for the PlayStation, and the derby side missions in Saints Row 2 were great fun for me because of it. Putting that in a bigger scale, with detailed destruction on street-level cars? I was in.

However, you play a police detective in Germany. I played a little longer than half an hour, but that’s purely because the tutorial took me half an hour and I wanted to experience the actual game. I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I feel like the video lied to me. I played the Patrol mode, which isn’t a set of missions, but responding to calls that come in over the police radio. You can accept or decline, then have to fulfil a series of objectives such as “Reach here in this amount of time” or “Chase suspect”. That’s not what I signed up for - after Need for Speed Most Wanted, I was up for a bit of racing with crushable cars and city-wide chaos. Why would I choose to obey the law when the video shows me explosions galore?

Will I keep playing

On the other hand, the bad voice acting was kinda charming, especially given how polished the graphics were and truly malleable the vehicles were. It’s the first game I’ve played where losing a front wheel doesn’t fail your mission. That’s literally something that happened - I smashed into a wall at an odd angle and my wheel came off - which caused a little bit of a challenge to drive across town a kilometre and a half…

It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I will certainly return to it. There are a couple of game modes I’ve yet to try, and of course I need to catch that damn guy who keeps escaping from me… Pity of having a self-imposed time limit - but a great excuse to go back to it.