Review: Monster Jam Crush It! (Switch)

By James Charlton

The game title that reviews itself

I will start the review by listing the game's best features.

• It loads quite quickly
• It has online leaderboards

If that's literally all you require from a game go ahead and download it now. For the rest of you, read on. 

This game series has actually been around since the Wii and back then it was an actual racing game with semi-functioning controls. This game, however, is a cheap cash-in of a more recent title and is an absolute abomination. The game presents you with what you think are four unique and differing game modes that are going to provide you with hours of endless fun. In reality, it's the same garbage gameplay repurposed in different garbage ways.

Stadium Races: Race a CPU car to the end of a course. All courses take place within a confined stadium and the "tracks" are just random overlay paths for you to follow. All races take 8-12 seconds to beat and there are twelve in total.

Crash Mode: Drive into flaming barrels and junked cars stolen from the N64 era for points. Each challenge takes 8-12 seconds to beat and there are ten in total.

Stadium Freestyle: Flick the right stick as you jump off mounds of dirt while the announcer half-heatedly says things like "marvelous" or "shocking." Oh, for points - it's another mode where you destroy stuff. There are six stadiums.

Hill Climb: From screenshots it looks like Trials Evolution. In reality you tape down the A button and come back fifteen minutes later to find the whole mode is completed. There is some more variety in the courses here; Forest, Desert, Harbour and Polar. All have seven tracks each.

The things that binds all these modes together are floaty, twitchy, slippery controls, the same half-dozen basic sound effects and butt-rock music tracks, graphics from generations we now consider retro and awful menu design. This game is so poorly thought out it doesn't even go on to the next track automatically after completing it, forcing you to scroll down from the top each time and then even select your truck again. 

The online leaderboards, which I listed as one of its two good points, are also poorly thought out. Fancy playing this game on the go? Well, look forward to a system-level error message after you beat every course as it tries to connect to the internet. Ah, good times.

In case I didn't make it painfully clear, this game is absolutely not worth your time or money. Avoid at all costs and thank me later.

Final Score: 1

(Review code provided by the publisher)