Crash Team Rumble final hands-on preview [SGF] – Teamwork makes the dream work

You’ve gotten several opinions from us on Crash Team Rumble, and here comes the third one. We got a little time with it during Summer Games Fest, and it’s a blast. I’m going to go into more detail below, but Crash Team Rumble is a unique take on something multiplayer, and I look forward to playing it again.

Our own David Flynn wrote our first preview from the beta, and while it’ll give you a lot, here’s another breakdown. There’s a fun map with wumpa fruit on it, and two colored zones for depositing them. Get to two thousand collected first, and you’re the victor. It sounds easy at first, but there’s a lot to actually hitting those numbers.

I played the majority of my time as scorer, but there are three soft-role archetypes at play. First is the aforementioned scorer whose main job is grabbing and depositing wumpa fruit, a blocker who can hit hard and keep the scorers down, and boosters who are trying to help the team get the best score possible. You can do all of these things in your role, but you’ll obviously do a bit better if you stick closer to what you’re good at.

There are also some perks in play, and these are useful in a pinch. I can’t get into all of them, but being able to call trash down onto an area to keep enemies occupied, or start a mega wumpa fruit growing worth an additional 100 regular fruit above your head was extremely helpful. There aren’t a ton, but I’d imagine these will grow in future seasons.

Playing the game can be an exercise in futility, but only if you don’t play with a team. This isn’t just a deathmatch, but requires you to work together to make things happen. Picking random characters won’t work, you all need to have a purpose in what you’re doing. Otherwise, it makes it easy for the other team to gain a foothold, like when my team was playing against three blockers in the first match. Sure, they did a lot of damage, but they weren’t doing a lot of scoring. It’s important not just to know your role, but execute with your teams.

Working with the map is also important. Let me explain, there are not only wumpa fruit on the map but different items, along with unlockable benefits. Relics can be used to unlock a small bonus like mushrooms that appear for a moment on your opponent’s depository to slow down their drops, or a mega one that could, for example, turn you into a giant. There are more than that, but overall it’s a neat variable to control and can make for an advantage. The maps are also really varied and feel unique even if the game mode stays the same.

There is so much more that could be said, but I need to play more of Crash Team Rumble to say it. Honestly, I want to play a lot more of it. At its core is a really fun idea, and it’s done in a way that can be played over and over again. It’s not necessarily the next Fortnite, but it got my competitive juices flowing. Crash Team Rumble arrives on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series consoles, and Xbox One on June 20th.

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