Crash: Tag Team Racing [PS2]

Gaming press tend to have their own special euphemism in reserve for a game like Crash Tag Team Racing: They "want to like it."

And they -- we -- really do, because there's arguably a lot here: Goofy combat racing (which is always in short supply); mostly good-natured gameplay; some commendable mechanical offerings; and a wealth of goodies, extras, and free-roaming variety. In the end, your personal verdict will probably come down to depth.

Players who want to jump right into the racing might be a little surprised at the platforming-heavy tutorial (voiced by a Howard Cosell/George Foreman-sounding pigeon duo), but they'll soon see that the game is presented in the form of a track-racing amusement park, divided into themed areas a la Disneyland (in fact, there's even a Mystery Island race named "Pirates of the Carburetor"). Crash can roam around the park itself, doing a lot of platform-based exploration, but the meat of the game is found on the differently themed tracks.

At first blush, it looks like by-the-book kart-racing -- cartoonish racers and courses, loony fauna-based weaponry chucked fore and aft by can-do characters, and interactive environmental hazards. But there are some notable touches.

Ambient animation abounds; drivers stand atop their cars, lean hard on their wheels, strike showoff poses, and vehicles sprout turbo jets with nitrous pickups. Cars actually take cumulative damage, burning and smoking with new hits. And then there's the "Clash" feature, which takes the notion that two heads are better than one to extremes. This feature dominates so much of the game's racing landscape.

When you close ranks with an opponent, you can employ the Clash command, which does a slow-mo fusing of two vehicles, effectively making it a bigger, tougher target... and arming it with an independently targetable weapon for use against other cars ahead or behind (while in this mode, the newly fused megacar will reliably navigate the track, allowing the player to concentrate on destruction).

It's cool... in fact, it may be too cool. Once you're Clashed, especially on easier difficulty levels, it becomes less about racing skill, and more about systematically eliminating any cars that might be a threat to you in the rankings.

Players can disengage from the Clash form at any time (getting a little send-off burst of boost, to boot) and then repeat the cycle with another car (if any are left). It's presumably designed to make players feel powerful... but it can easily feel cheap and unsatisfying. To be fair, this effect is blunted somewhat on higher difficulty levels (where greater monetary rewards also await the winner of any given race). At least Clash-form vehicles have a wider range of weapon options than standalone vehicles (although for entertainment value, we still find ourselves tending to use individual vehicles).

For a "racing" game, there's an awful lot of on-foot exploration. There are also lots of crates to spin-smash for coins, barriers to remove with switches, optional costumes to purchase, and non-player characters to talk to (and use to unlock new cars). There are also some distracting, but ultimately limited mini-games, which include duck-hunting, animal skeet shooting, and the now seemingly obligatory "penguin bowling."

Aside from the limitations regarding the racing mechanics, the biggest irritation is the camera in the free-roaming portions of the game. There are many times when the camera won't let you see properly, and making a jump becomes a matter of educated guesswork. It really doesn't matter that much, ultimately -- but it adds time and frustration to the platforming elements.

Also, much of the game is pretty shallow. It's great when your on-foot explorations can trigger some event that adds a hitherto-unseen shortcut to a racetrack, but humorous death animations for death animations' sake do not gameplay make (and this does happen).

The story? Irrelevant. The overall audio? Forgettable-verging-on-annoying. Also, what appears to be a wealth of race modes -- for example, the "Crashinator" mode, where you must run down targets along a track -- also comes up short in the end in terms of replay.

Multiplayer helps the package, but is still a thorned rose, indeed. There's no online, which hurts... but split-screen multiplayer definitely has some antagonistic spice, and offsets the essential brevity of the basic single-player game.

Those partial to the Crash brand of humor, who don't mind the game's overriding "kiddieness," will definitely want to focus on the vibrant, ambient tracks and the replay value of the multiplayer. While the cars could use a greater sense of mass, it's smooth racing with a decent framerate even when things on the track get hairy (and this is when they're most fun). Players more concerned with depth of gameplay than anything else may want to consider a rental first.