Imagine coming home after a long trip away. Everything is just as you left it as you approach your door, covered by an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. It feels right, it smells right, you're truly, finally home. But when you open the door, you notice immediately, something is off. The legs of your dining room table are all different sizes. The lights have an odd tint to them. Your wife repeats the same three lines of dialogue often. The floor seems to be covered in invisible tar. Your staircase causes your knee to give out whenever you use it, which isn't painful but it is kind of embarrassing and makes you not want to use the stairs. Everything is just very SLIGHTLY off. But it's still home, so you go through it, and then people tell you that the final boss of your home will be horrible and you remember him being horrible but he's not that bad if you nail the shortcut on two laps and honestly it's not that hard of a shortcut, Jungle Boogie's felt less consistent at least this one you have a vertical leap for.

That is the experience of playing Crash Nitro Kart. Everything about this game is so very close to being excellent - not even "as CTR was", just excellent on its own merits - but everything is very SLIGHTLY off. Ideas like frenzy and anti-gravity are super cool and exhilarating, but lose novelty and both distract from the act of racing with some odd stiffness. The lines you take have less of a natural curve, making the relic races simultaneously more slippery whilst requiring more precision. Track design is inspired at times, but the geometry of the levels causes you to bonk and lose speed more often than is necessary. There are some solid items, but computer racers NEVER hit traps, so you're just kinda left to avoid your own stuff and suffer as wumpa crate drops have been nerfed across the board. You have to beat the game twice, 100%, to actually finish it. And everything is just a biiiit too slow, causing races to drag on far longer than they should (something Nitro Fueled would later prove by letting you blaze through some of these tracks).

There is an INCREDIBLY fun game in here with a fantastically high skill ceiling, but every single step of the way there is a small problem or annoyance eating at this game's heels that keeps it from achieving everything it wants to, and they add up. It's a fascinating experience and I'm a Big Norm fan through and through (the fact that I can't play as him is tragic), the team clearly did their homework to see what made CTR work, but this needed either more budget or more time in the oven than what the publisher was willing to afford it. At least it has the fastest reset in the world; they knew some of those CNK Challenges would be miserable bits of trial and error.

Memories and nostalgia can really affect your perception of games. When I played this as a kid, I had a blast. But once I revisited it recently... it kinda sucked.

It's really not that fun to play, and unless if I was fumbling something that my younger self figured out, I always felt very slow. I still think the tracks are cool, it's not an irredeemable game. Maybe if you're a Crash fan you could check it out, but I don't think I'll be touching it anymore.

SCORE: 5/10

By no means the best karting game in the Crash series. However it's a very fun playthrough nonetheless. The premise of the story is honestly very funny and the cutscenes are quite enjoyable.
The art style of the game is quite good looking and the mechanic of being able to hop/jump in your vehicle in the game always felt like a clever choice so that the game could incorporate elements of the series' classic platformer playstyle.
The live leaderboard and accel. meter are nice ubiquitous features across karters of the time. The live map with coloured dots to indicate certain characters wasn't perfectly implemented in this game and is hard to see and comprehend while also driving, and is done far better by its follow up CTTR as with just about everything else.
The primary issue with this game for me is how SLOW it is. Like, seriously. Among the slowest karters I've played (Probably a big plus for beginners, young kids or people who struggle with faster-paced racing.)

"Crash Nitro Kart" falls short of capturing the magic of the original "Crash Team Racing," offering a gameplay experience that fails to innovate or surpass its predecessor. While it remains enjoyable to play with friends, the game lacks significant improvements over the original, resulting in a sense of stagnation. The addition of anti-gravity tracks is a notable improvement, injecting some freshness into the formula, but it's not enough to elevate the overall experience. Despite its shortcomings, "Crash Nitro Kart" still provides some entertainment value, particularly in multiplayer settings. However, for fans expecting a worthy successor to "Crash Team Racing," this game may disappoint with its lack of innovation and failure to capture the same level of excitement.