Are CTR's Grand Prixs Enough?

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled's Grand Prixs have been an intriguing lot. After all, they have extended the initial launch of Nitro-Fueled beyond that of June and have since held monthly events where new content can be downloaded and experienced. Question is... is it enough?

What Are the Grand Prixs?

Since July, Nitro-Fueled has released its own form of DLC in the form of Grand Prix events. With them has come a slew of new content. This works in that a new track becomes available, FREE to play on by everyone, in addition to new karts and new characters. The characters, on the whole, can be unlocked in the 'pit stop' menu, where you spend hard-earned Wumpa Coins to unlock a rotating selection of items each day. Each Grand Prix comes with one main character that normally spawns the theme of the Grand Prix, which can be unlocked by earning what is known as 'Nitro', instead. 'Nitro' is essentially a metre that fills up from performing daily, weekly and Grand Prix themed tasks, earning Bronze, Silver and Gold tiered rewards over time. The main Grand Prix-themed character is unlocked once you fill up the entire Bronze tiered Nitro gauge, with additional prizes along the way and after, should you pursue them.

You earn Nitro to gain rewards in Grand Prixs

Nitro Tour

I must say, it's all been particularly entertaining to prolong the life of the game. The first Grand Prix was called Nitro Tour and it's safe to say it won over the hearts of many a fan. After all, people could now have access the rock-and-sock-'em Tawna from the original Crash Bandicoot - Crash's one-time girlfriend and now full-time kart racer. With her came what is known as the Nitro Squad - basically the slightly demeaning title of 'Trophy Girl's from the original CTR podiums. That meant suddenly there were five unique female bandicoots to play as, all with their own personalities and stats. While poor Liz didn't favour so well online, gym-bunny Ami certainly did, but I'll put it down to their stats more than anything (speed class characters are always more popular, whilst tight-turners are virtually never played as).

Nitro Tour's track was the less than thrilling, uh, Nitro Tour. I... don't understand the story behind this track. At first, I thought it would be an Egyptian-themed track ala the tombs in Crash Bandicoot: WARPED, but after you race on some wide and uneventful sand and quite an empty tomb, you fly out into an Arabian bazaar. It's very odd. I thought it would lead into other time periods and be a WARPED-inspired track, but instead it ended up as just these two places in theme, before looping back on itself. What's even more confusing is that the Egypt portion is at night, but the Arabian portion as at day. I really struggle to understand this track and why it is like it is. I would forgive it if I thought it was a good track, but alas, I don't think it is that, either. However, the Nitro Tour Grand Prix did give us some great additional characters, so that makes for a good start.

Tawna tears up the road with the Nitro Squad

Back N. Time

The second Grand Prix was Back N. Time. Like Tawna, Baby T was a long-time wanted playable character in the game, so it wasn't surprising to see him as the main character of the Grand Prix. In a strange twist of fate, we also received a Fake Crash styled Baby T as an alternate costume for his Gold tier reward. It's neat, but, uh, why does it then leak into the track that came with it?

Prehistoric Playground was the track that came with Back N. Time and it's frankly brilliant. Super fun right from the off, it's full of branching paths, dinosaurs at every turn and some great music. There's even those weird Fake Crash style dinosaurs, which I don't understand, but they're there! It makes up for Nitro Tour in every way.

It's just the other characters I don't quite understand. We only received two other characters with this Grand Prix, in Baby Crash and Baby Coco. These are... eh. I'm not sure who wanted them. I'm not even sure why they're there, like the Fake Crash dinosaurs. They baffle me in every way, really. They're not the established Baby Cortex and Baby Tropy from WARPED, neither do they look cute (quite the opposite, actually), so I don't understand why they're there. Fun, I suppose. We did receive some amazing costumes and karts in this Grand Prix, however, with a Flinstones-esque mammoth kart popping up as well as Crash Tag Team Racing's Probulot hover-car - a favourite of mine from the original 2005 game.

Baby T, Baby Crash and Baby Coco crash karts in Prehistoric Playground

Spyro and Friends

The final Grand Prix, to date, is Spyro and Friends. This one's the most exciting of all, to me, since we finally get Spryo in a kart racer that isn't Nitro Kart on the GameBoy Advance. Yes, I've been wanting a console Spyro in a kart for a long time now. So he's clearly the main character of the Grand Prix, along with his own inspired karts (which are frankly brilliant, too). He even has Sparx as his mask power-up in-game. Now that's amazing.

The Spyro Circuit track is an intriguing one. On the one hand, I absolutely love the Spyro-styled visuals and very inline with his games it is. Well, in particular, the original Spyro the Dragon game. There are portals that teleport your kart to different realms and I just think that's a fantastic touch, meaning you start in Artisans, dart through parts of Dark Hollow, and pop out in Wizard Peak before heading through the High Caves and back 'round again. It's all very well handled, with ? crates being replaced by ? baskets and containers, and wumpa fruit turning into gems. However, the other hand is that the track is very linear and quite snug. That means there's no room for interesting shortcuts or getting out of harm's way should a missile come tearing up your derrière.

Spyro, Hunter and Gnasty Gnork pop up in Nitro-Fueled

Best of all, the Spyro Grand Prix has some of the most fun skins for other characters. Wizard Komodo Joe looks very aesthetically pleasing in his fantasy attire, whilst gnome Velo and orc versions of both Norms are wonderful additions. There's even a cute viking Polar for good measure. Those are, of course, in addition to Spyro characters Hunter and Gnasty Gnork, the latter of which I think should have been Bianca from Spyro 3 instead, but I guess you can't have 'em all.

There's also NV versions of Coco and Crunch inspired from Mind Over Mutant, back from 2008, which seems ludicrous but very welcome. I also liked Coco's Mind Over Mutant design, whereas Crunch looks like a super punk rocker in his brainwashed gear. It's just a shame the skin for Coco is called Evil Coco, which makes me think more of her doppleganger from 2004's Twinsanity cut material, or 2002's N-Tranced version of brainwashed Coco (called Evil Coco in that game, unsurprisingly enough).

There are plenty of rewards to acquire in each Grand Prix

The Problem

The idea to release new content after a game's release isn't a new one. Downloadable content has been a thing in games since around 2007, where those wishing for more out of their games can choose to pay for additional content. This paywall style of earning has been popular with publishers, of course, as it allows them to capitalise on the game post-release. Nitro-Fueled's approach is slightly different in that you don't have to pay for the separate content. You can simply play the game and earn what is known as Wumpa Coins in order to then purchase additional characters, skins and karts from an in-game menu called the pit stop. This worked for the first month or so, until... well, publishers Activision decided to make it so that you can choose to purchase Wumpa Coins with real money, which is then used to unlock the additional components in-game. I'm not going to get bogged down in talking about this (not today, anyway), but let's just say it was an unpopular decision amongst fans. The good thing that stayed, however, is that it has remained optional.

That's just the first problem hampering Nitro-Fueled right now. However, most concerns for me come from whether these Grand Prixs are doing enough considering their... other issues.

The first problem is how the new items are unlocked. The pit stop is actually perfectly fine by itself - a place where you spend Wumpa Coins to unlock what you want. It's just the daily rotation that kills it. This works by having a around eight different items appears in the pit stop, with the items changing each day on a rotation basis. That means you often can't unlock what you want to unlock right from the get go, but wait for a day until the item you want appears. There have often been times where I haven't unlocked something until right at the end of the Grand Prix just because I so happened to be away on weekends when every time a certain character or skin pops up, for example.

The tasks for earning Nitro are also a little bland. They're mostly the same tasks repeated. For examply, the daily tasks often ask you to complete one of the racing cups, along with using a specific character on a specific track or perform 10 trick jumps on a specific track. They're often all the same track, by the way. It's good in that you can stack the tasks as a result, but also poor in that they become rather monotonous and predictable. Some have just become a real chore over time, such as winning in each battle mode type on one map, for example, which essentially boils down to just plugging in a second controller and slowly doing the whole thing by yourself (because to do it with friends online becomes far more stretched out than it needs to be). In the end, earning Nitro becomes a chore and not really all that fun. Luckily, it's all optional, but it could have a bit more entertainment to it.

Other aspects are the glitches. The Back N. Time Grand Prix was a source of displeasure for me as I didn't have Baby Coco or Baby Crash for quite some time. Not because I didn't have the coins to unlock them (partly - more on that in a moment) or because I didn't see them in the rotations, but because Nitro-Fueled consistently took my Wumpa Coins to unlock them but... then didn't. So they continued to turn up in the pit stop and continue to remain locked in my character selection screens, despite having spent the Wumpa Coins on them. This finally resolved itself following a patch to fix some in-game warp orb nonsense, but I found myself in dismay as I experienced it again come the Spyro and Friends Grand Prix with Gnasty Gnork. This was eventually fixed, once again, but had I been a less patient guy, I most certainly would have been furious at this enough to not play for a while. After all, the coins are really only given to you so wildly on the weekends, with every other day being a little bit of a grind.

Wumpa Coin payout is woefully low when playing offline

That neatly brings me to my next cause of concern. The coin output is woeful unless you're playing online, or are playing online on the weekends. There was a period in which I was forced to move out of my house and spent a solid two-three weeks without internet, which was ironic because that was when I most wanted to play Nitro-Fueled to take my mind off of things. During this time, I was punished for not having the 'net, which made unlocking characters a nightmare for the Nitro Tour Grand Prix. I also have a friend who was lucky enough to play the game with me upon his visit to my new place, which he admitted he enjoyed enough to acquire a copy for himself. Unfortunately, he sold it a couple of weeks later, with his own admission being "it's just too slow to unlock the characters once you finish Adventure Mode - there's not a lot to the game unless you play it online". As he didn't have PS+ for his PlayStation 4, and with no other console, he didn't play the game online. It makes me wonder how many others have been hit hard by not being able to earn the pit stop unlockables without some considerable effort just because they don't or can't play the game online. It means any additonal Grand Prix content is wasted on them.

Which all makes me think... are the Grand Prixs doing enough to keep people invested? The additional content is nice and fans like myself really appreciate the additions, which has certainly kept me playing consistently since the game's release. However, unless you're a hardcore fan, I don't think it's doing enough to keep some of the more casual players invested, or those that are into Mario Kart but aren't so invested in the world of Crash.

The Nitro Squad were the first of many Grand Prix specific unlockables

A Bit of a Push

By the end of the Spyro and Friends Grand Prix, the game is looking like it may need a special push to keep it going a while longer outside of more Grand Prix events. This feels like a good point to have a full on DLC for Nitro Kart's Adventure Mode, or even something entirely new. In what form that takes, I don't know, but I think there needs to be something in addition to the Grand Prixs this far in.

But what for the future of the Grand Prixs? Well, who knows? Hopefully we'll receive some more details in the near future. For now, I need to grind some more Nitro for that Evil Crunch skin before I'm marching in Holland with a trumpet for a week and the Grand Prix ends. Send help.