Crashday: Redline Edition
released on Aug 10, 2017
An expanded game of Crashday
Crashday: Redline Edition is the multiplayer arcade racer with near limitless possibilities! Race. Wreck. Shoot. Smash. Seven game modes. Battle online and offline. On roads and in arenas. Design and share your own tracks. Play the game the way you like. Today there are no rules. Today is Crashday!
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Played as part of CONQUERING MY CHILDHOOD
This era of racing games speaks to me quite a lot, since I grew up alongside a lot of them. Watching my brother play Burnout 3 or NFS Underground on his Xbox, or playing slightly more awkward derivatives like FlatOut on my own PC. Crashday is the purest embodiment of an "awkwad derivative" of those classics - it pulls a similar-feeling 'illegal racing operation' aesthetic while boasting arcade-y racing with a focus on aggression; however, while the other games feel relatively grounded in their own flavour of chaos, Crashday is simply absurd, a synthesis of all the things the developers thought would be so cool, though!! What if cars, but with MACHINE GUNS and MISSILE LAUNCHERS!! And you can SHOOT EACH OTHER in races and BLOW EACH OTHER UP!!! What if HUGE RAMPS that you can TURBO BOOST OFF and do LOTS OF FLIPS!!!!!
In spite of all the extra bells and whistles, as a simple racing game it works rather well. The cars don't spin out very easily but don't take corners amazingly either, so it still takes some effort to maneuver around some of the trickier corners - or, you could just slam side-on straight into the wall and turbo boost away to keep your momentum going! The potential for your opponents to shove a missile into your back and ruin your race is balanced out by the fact that you can just do it back to them, and also the AI is, frankly, not very good - you can easily jet ahead of them far past the risk of being taken out. I'm sure the weapons would be a great laugh with a bunch of friends in multiplayer, but let's be honest, are you gonna convince your friend group to buy Crashday of all things?
Where Crashday falls short is, maybe ironically, in one of the areas it seems most proud of. Crashday offers multiple other gamemodes aside from races, with all of them being mandatory at least a couple times in the career mode. It's refreshing to jump between a bunch of different modes, and helps ward away the age-old problem I bring up about every singleplayer racing game - the boredom of just driving laps in first place. Unfortunately, these modes all have individual problems - some small, some a bit less so - that almost makes you wish you were just driving laps over and over. As a couple of examples of some of the more common ones - Stunt Shows task you with performing stunts to get the highest score, expecting you to chain multiple stunts together to get a high multiplier. A lot of the stunt maps aren't built to make chaining feel easy or natural, though - they just feel like a set of disjointed ramps and loops where you just can't clear the distance between them in time. Their other 'main' mode, Wrecking Match, is effectively a demolition derby - a mode that I never found all that compelling in car games, but your machine guns and missile launchers only point forwards! Do you know how hard it is to actually aim those things!
Crashday, for better and for worse, feels like the "awkward teen in puberty" of this style of arcade racer. It's a feel that I absolutely adore - it feels more 'indie' than most popular indie games nowadays! - but it's clear that it was trying really hard to find its own identity, and the solid racing game behind it becomes inseparable from its awkward processes of experimentation and self-discovery.
(also fair warning, it has a bunch of weird casual sexism in the career mode. sort of like 'football dad' "i hate my wife" kind of jokes. i didn't know where else to put this but it stuck out to me enough to where i didn't want to leave it out)
This era of racing games speaks to me quite a lot, since I grew up alongside a lot of them. Watching my brother play Burnout 3 or NFS Underground on his Xbox, or playing slightly more awkward derivatives like FlatOut on my own PC. Crashday is the purest embodiment of an "awkwad derivative" of those classics - it pulls a similar-feeling 'illegal racing operation' aesthetic while boasting arcade-y racing with a focus on aggression; however, while the other games feel relatively grounded in their own flavour of chaos, Crashday is simply absurd, a synthesis of all the things the developers thought would be so cool, though!! What if cars, but with MACHINE GUNS and MISSILE LAUNCHERS!! And you can SHOOT EACH OTHER in races and BLOW EACH OTHER UP!!! What if HUGE RAMPS that you can TURBO BOOST OFF and do LOTS OF FLIPS!!!!!
In spite of all the extra bells and whistles, as a simple racing game it works rather well. The cars don't spin out very easily but don't take corners amazingly either, so it still takes some effort to maneuver around some of the trickier corners - or, you could just slam side-on straight into the wall and turbo boost away to keep your momentum going! The potential for your opponents to shove a missile into your back and ruin your race is balanced out by the fact that you can just do it back to them, and also the AI is, frankly, not very good - you can easily jet ahead of them far past the risk of being taken out. I'm sure the weapons would be a great laugh with a bunch of friends in multiplayer, but let's be honest, are you gonna convince your friend group to buy Crashday of all things?
Where Crashday falls short is, maybe ironically, in one of the areas it seems most proud of. Crashday offers multiple other gamemodes aside from races, with all of them being mandatory at least a couple times in the career mode. It's refreshing to jump between a bunch of different modes, and helps ward away the age-old problem I bring up about every singleplayer racing game - the boredom of just driving laps in first place. Unfortunately, these modes all have individual problems - some small, some a bit less so - that almost makes you wish you were just driving laps over and over. As a couple of examples of some of the more common ones - Stunt Shows task you with performing stunts to get the highest score, expecting you to chain multiple stunts together to get a high multiplier. A lot of the stunt maps aren't built to make chaining feel easy or natural, though - they just feel like a set of disjointed ramps and loops where you just can't clear the distance between them in time. Their other 'main' mode, Wrecking Match, is effectively a demolition derby - a mode that I never found all that compelling in car games, but your machine guns and missile launchers only point forwards! Do you know how hard it is to actually aim those things!
Crashday, for better and for worse, feels like the "awkward teen in puberty" of this style of arcade racer. It's a feel that I absolutely adore - it feels more 'indie' than most popular indie games nowadays! - but it's clear that it was trying really hard to find its own identity, and the solid racing game behind it becomes inseparable from its awkward processes of experimentation and self-discovery.
(also fair warning, it has a bunch of weird casual sexism in the career mode. sort of like 'football dad' "i hate my wife" kind of jokes. i didn't know where else to put this but it stuck out to me enough to where i didn't want to leave it out)