It’s always interesting to go into a review for a game sequel when you’ve never heard of the previous installments, especially when that game involves racing, exploring, and driving; some of my favorite activities. It’s been over six years since Crash Drive 2 offered gamers a taste of free-roaming, open world, multiplayer racing, and now M2H is back to expand and enhance on that original formula in Crash Drive 3, releasing on nine separate platforms with cross-play among them all for one of the biggest and most active racing communities I’ve ever experienced at launch.
Crash Drive 3 offers a modest single-player mode that can be completed in around 3-4 hours, but this is mostly training; a non-competitive way to learn the lay of the land so you won’t embarrass yourself when you finally launch the primary PLAY mode of the game. Here, you are thrown into one of the game’s five unique world environments with up to 11 other gamers. A logo next to their name tells what system they are playing on or you can toggle off cross-play support if you wish, but I saw no reason to do this. Even on launch day the game was running great with no lag and smooth player drop-in/out between events.
Much of the content is shared between the offline and online modes, but there are numerous events that you can only experience in the multiplayer mode like King of the Hill, Cops & Robbers, Steal the Crown, etc. Player XP and cash are shared between modes and the winnings in multiplayer are often far greater than the $2,500 you make winning a solo event. The pacing of the game is unique in that you have this small window between events that counts down offering you brief moments to explore and collect hidden secrets or smash cash crates. There is very little downtime so you are always engaged in these randomly changing events.
Crash Drive 3 has some really fun events for both single and multiplayer. Each level has ten rings that you must find and drive/fly through. There are also numerous hidden secrets (they look like the old Windows logo) that you can find as you explore the levels. About every minute a new event will be announced and you are free to play or ignore them, but I found no way to actually cancel them. You can disable the teleport to a race event by honking your horn but the race still happens. Events are varied in their challenge and fun levels. Solo players have standard checkpoint races, coin collecting, stunt tagging, ring find, and destroying a giant beach ball. Races are exactly what you’d expect, passing through sequential checkpoints, while the coin collecting has you driving through various 10/25/50 cent coins to reach a certain amount before the timer expires. Stunt tagging merely requires you to perform stunts off of ramps, loops, and such to tag that item and add it to the required total. Ring Find randomly selects one of the ten rings on that level and gives you just a few seconds to pass through it while the Beach Ball Destruction drops a massive beach ball into the level and you must crash into it doing 100 points of damage within the time limit. It’s harder than you think with the ball bouncing and rolling around, and the most damage you can do is 10 points under full turbo.
The ten events are great but I could certainly do with some more, as I was starting to get a bit bored after 12+ hours. At this point the only real motivation to keep playing is to unlock all of the gated content like the 47 cars, 36 antennas, 21 boosts, and 11 license plates. Even the other levels are gated behind collecting green rings in your current level and an increasing amount of cash – $50,000 for that ticket to the moon. There are also numerous cup challenges that pop-up that require you to perform certain actions, often in certain levels using certain vehicles. Achievements and trophies are another good incentive with many locked behind some very specific activities. I particularly enjoyed the trophy you earn for glitching the game and falling through the world. You have to respect a developer that acknowledges a bug in their game by giving you a reward when it happens.
While you can easily finish the game with only a few cars there is something surprisingly addictive in unlocking the entire garage and seeing the wide assortment of fun and crazy vehicles hidden behind those locked silhouettes. Many vehicles are locked behind progression gates and large sums of cash – a reason to keep playing the multiplayer, and cars are slowly upgraded over time by simply driving them. Impatient gamers can pay to max out their car specs, which in turn increases your player level granting you access to more content.
The level designs are insanely fun. On both the Xbox and PC versions I started in the Forest levels with the Arctic level opening up next, but the PS5 version started me in the Canyon level then unlocked the Forest as part of the tutorial. Other levels include the Moon, first accessed by unlocking the rocket in Area 51 in the Canyon level and the Tropic level unlocked with the Ferry also in the Canyon level. The Moon level is crazy with reduced gravity allowing you to practically fly your car around using your nitrous just like in Rocket League. The Tropics level is home to a special garage featuring all sorts of tanks that you can use to play thrilling Tank Battles on narrow platforms and arenas suspended above the landscape. This activity is crazy-addictive, bringing back ancient memories of Atari 2600 Combat and Battlezone from the arcade. The tank combat has its own progression system that will unlock other tanks that offer their own unique style of play.
Available on nine platforms, I personally tested and played Crash Drive 3 on three; the PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. At first and even second glance it’s easy to see that M2H isn’t pushing any boundaries when it comes to graphics. When it comes to models and textures this is the stuff we saw on PS3, but the developers are leverage the power of the next consoles and PC to display these massive, albeit simple worlds clear to the horizon with virtually no LOD pop. Part of this is due to the default camera angle that points slightly down on the car to limit the horizon view. You can pull back the stick to see farther ahead but the view resets the moment you let go. All three version of the game I played looked identical, but there were some performance hiccups on both the console versions when making fast turns and doing e-brake slides and 180’s where the screen would stutter as the view shifted laterally. My RTX 3080 equipped PC was flawless.
Update: Prior to posting this review I installed and briefly played Crash Drive 3 on both the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One. Not surprising, the game looked nearly identical to its next-gen counterparts and also exhibited the same sideways stutter when doing fast/extreme turns.
Crash Drive 3 is a fun solo and multiplayer open-world racer with plenty of discovery elements combined with racing, combat, and stunt challenges that will keep you entertained for hours. It does start to get grindy after a bit but the fast-paced nature of the game flow and varied events help mask the grind for cash, as you save up for that next big car purchase or expensive upgrade. A fun and rewarding experience for gamers of all ages.
