GAME CLEAR No. 304 -- Cruis'n Blast

Cruis’n Blast (2021, Switch/Arcade)

Developer: Raw Thrills
Publisher: Raw Thrills
Clear Version: Switch
Clear Platform: Switch 2
Clear Date: 7/9/26

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Why should I care?
The kind of bad but strangely persistent Cruis’n series has returned! Good for it?

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For a bruis’n

Never let it be said that I only write about games I like on here. In doing a bit of backlog grooming, I came across Cruis’n Blast on my shelf and decided it was finally time to knock this thing out. I quickly found that it was more amusement park ride than racing game. It’s got some decent spectacle and is a pretty family-friendly affair, but it’s simply too mechanically weak to recommend.

The fundamental problem with the game is that its races are essentially scripted. The races are in rally format, and after the countdown, the nine other cars go hauling ass at impossible speeds ahead of you. Before too long, you catch up to positions seven, eight, and nine. Around halfway through the race, the middle of the pack becomes reachable. Toward the end, the game finally allows you to compete with the front of the pack and potentially overtake them.

A little AI fudging is very common in racing games. A little rubber banding or position forcing is pretty normal. The problem is that Cruis’n Blast takes it too far. There are points in the race in which boosting effectively does nothing because the cars ahead of you are locked to a certain distance in front of your position. That simply doesn’t feel good! It is, in fact, a complete waste of a limited resource. However, the result of this is that winning a race is actually a fairly simple proposition. First of all, despite each vehicle listing stats, I have found no meaningful difference in their performance when actually playing the game. Second, because driving even moderately well will put you in roughly fourth place for the home stretch, all you need to do is hoard your three boosts and then hammer them at the end of the race. I’ve had incredible success with this.

I sort of understand why this game is the way it is — it’s designed to manufacture photo finishes. Inasmuch as it was originally made as a head-to-head arcade title, I get why Raw Thrills would want the game to work this way. Close races are more exciting, and they also engender a “run it back!” feeling in the loser. That’s great and all, but it doesn’t make for a very fun solo experience, and in any case I think it’s pretty disrespectful to the players.

Everything else about the experience mirrors this style-over-substance approach. The original arcade game spanned some five locales from around the world: London, Death Valley (California), Singapore, Hong Kong, and Madagascar. Each features setpiece after setpiece of ridiculous action. Sheets of ice cracking away causing the race to proceed into a massive chasm, giant animals stomping across the track, a tornado ripping through, etc. This is, in fact, part of why opposing racers have such fixed positions relative to the player; you can’t very well have opponents clipping through a spot in the ground where that aforementioned crack in the ice hasn’t appeared yet. The game serves the spectacle, not the other way around.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this is that the game’s eight Tours (sets of four races, like most racing games’ Grand Prix modes) simply recycle the game’s five tracks with different set dressing. Don’t like the stages as they are? Well what if a UFO flew around the track shooting at it (but being careful to never actually hit you)? How about now?

I’ll admit that I do think the game has its charm. It’s goofy and arcadey in a very unabashed way. You can unlock and drive as all kinds of things like fire trucks, unicorns, and hammerhead sharks (although more to my taste are the classic Corvettes, Cadillacs, and Camaros licensed from the good folks at General Motors). The crazy, action-packed tracks are pretty fun to look at, and the game does elicit a pretty solid sense of speed. A simple button press executes wheelies and flips. Its forgiving nature would also, I think, make it appealing to kids and parents alike for playing together. People playing it perhaps once or twice in an arcade setting probably wouldn’t even notice the ways its design is rather seriously flawed.

But again, I don’t think the nature of the product is a good excuse for making a game that eschews skill so greatly. And besides, it does make for a fairly lousy home console product.

Mediocre as this game may be, it did let me spend a couple hours flying through its courses in a split-window Corvette Stingray. Hard to call it a total loss in light of that.

Oh, and it has the most inane, moronic main menu theme that I also can’t help but love.

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As a little throwback for this post, my box art image is of an actual box (or, more likely, a rendering thereof) with the console logo and ESRB rating intact rather than just the art itself. That was my standard in the early days of this blog, but I’ve mostly moved to using the cleaner look of the unbranded/rated art.

I did this as a little hat tip, I suppose, to the physical video game. Anyone reading this blog has surely heard the news that Sony announced the end of disc production beginning in 2028. I have a lot of thoughts about that. Perhaps I’ll write more later. I don’t think it’s news to anyone reading this that I’m a devoted lifelong collector of video games and take pride in what I’ve amassed.

Anyway, again. That’s a blog for another day. But it’s also relevant because this game was delisted a little over a week ago likely because of its licensing agreements with General Motors and/or Nissan (believe it or not, my revisiting this game was actually a coincidence unrelated to that news). The only way you can purchase it now is to find some unsold stock of the cart or buy it secondhand. Makes you think!!! Fortunately, Sony does not own any significant flagship racing titles (with hundreds of licensed cars) beloved by millions, so it’s probably fine.