Cruis'n Blast

Cruis’n Blast is as arcadey as an arcade racer can be. It has the high thrills and high stakes that are so over the top, but that’s the charm of the Cruis’n series. It doesn’t require so much setup to just get a few races in. If you are itching for wild thrills and quick rides, this is the perfect pickup.

I’ve been a fan of the Cruis’n franchise ever since they released Cruis’n USA on the Nintendo 64 back in 1996. Sure, it might not have been to the most glamorous game, or even have had great gameplay mechanics (they were atrocious), but something about its insane, high-speed action still enamored me and my friends alike. There was something so appealing about racing through various areas of the US at breakneck speeds, even if the San Francisco levels made me want to throw my controller...

Cruis’n Blast is an absurd, bombastic, and fun trip through the Wayback Machine to the days of quarter-munching arcade racers.

I absolutely do miss those days. I can’t get on with realistic racing games, so I crave a steady diet of the stuff that Cruis’n Blast gives. At the same time, I normally rented racing games on the N64 and rarely bought them. The same would have held true for Cruis’n Blast. It’s too fleeting to really grab hold of my grey matter and make a home there. I had a lot of fun while it lasted, but now it’s time to return to the beige, carefully curated modernity.

Cruis’n Blast is a faithful port of the arcade classic, that suffers from the straight port of the same game. It’s fun, it’s fast, and will keep you entertained for hours. However, unless you’re a huge fan of arcade racers, you may end up putting this down and never picking it back up. There’s no substance and that hurts the game in the long run.

Cruis’n Blast answers many of those age-old questions: what would happen if a fire truck raced a hammerhead shark? Could a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado outpace a unicorn? And can an arcade racer work on a console in the year 2021? The first two questions can be answered by cycling through the game’s wonderfully weird roster of unlockable vehicles, ranging from sensible and licensed (the Nissan GT-R) to the unabashedly strange (a unicorn). The answer to that last query is “yes” but with notable caveats, as the latest entry in the Cruis’n series makes the jump from cabinet to console with moderate suc...

Eugene Jarvis' classic arcade racer now has a console version of its 2017 sequel and it's full of wacky courses and off-the-wall gameplay.

Cruis’n Blast focuses on style over substance, making the end result feel a bit hollow. Navigating a careening ferris wheel is the stuff action movies are made of, but there’s just not enough content here to justify picking this home release up over sinking a few bucks into the arcade version.

All things considered, it took me a little over an hour or so to see just about everything that Cruis’n Blast has to offer. The Nintendo Switch racing scene has been dominated by Mario Kart and I feel like Cruis’n Blast had a chance to make a real case for bringing other classic Nintendo racers back into the scene. But if lackluster graphics and mediocre racing mechanics are all we’d get it might be better to leave our precious memories in the past. Cruis’n Blast isn’t unplayable though and would probably make an enjoyable experience for someone with kids or younger siblings. Everyone else sho...