Crash Team Rumble Review: Multiplayer Gameplay Impressions, Videos and Top Modes

Crash Bandicoot and friends return with Crash Team Rumble, a four-on-four team-based competition.

After successful stints for the series in recent years with 2019's Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled and 2020's Crash Bandicoot 4, developer Toys for Bob and Activision team up for a unique take on the party-game scene.

Mascot-based party games aren't anything new, but Crash Team Rumble turns the idea of them and competitive multiplayer on its head—opposing teams face off in a race to 2,000 Wumpa Fruit in a strategic platformer with defined roles for players.

Simple and fun at face value with a shocking amount of depth, Crash Team Rumble has some interesting legs as a possible sleeper hit.

Graphics and Gameplay

Like Crash Bandicoot 4, the first in the series to make the next-generation leap, Crash Team Rumble is a vibrant experience with a ton of personality that just pops right off the screen.

Packed with a handful of stages that are diverse and unique, it feels and looks like a greatest hits for the series. There's the dusty desert area, one with a bunch of foliage and tons of series-specific things like techno-lights and caution tape all over the place.

Crash and friends are again exaggerated and expressive to a hilarious degree, muttering catchphrases and one-liners in response to the action as they go.

It fits right in with the sound design too, as the expected litany of goofy hits on the soundtrack play out in the background and impactful sound effects narrate the action. New and fitting is the overarching announcer counting down before matches and calling out when power-ups are ready or expire, the swooping camera angles at the start of a match that reveal locations of items, post-knockout screens and the post-game happenings.

At its most basic, a match winner captures the most Wumpa fruit. Players jump, spin and slam around the maps collecting fruit from the ground or the usual Crash crates while using abilities and seeking out strong power-ups or advantage-giving items.

Along the way, the controls feel fantastic. It's a testament to the overarching series itself that it simply feels like more Crash Bandicoot in terms of simplistic button inputs and responsiveness.

Crash and each of the characters have unique abilities and skills, ranging from how much Wumpa they can hold, how much health they have and more. The objective is to get the fruit back to the bank to hit that 2,000-mark before the other team.

Really deepening the gameplay experience is the fact each character excels in certain roles during a match. These are Scorer, Blocker, and Booster categories. The first two are exactly what they sound like, with Blockers capable of knocking collected Wumpa from opponents.

Boosters are more of a specialty role that excels in collecting Gem Clusters, items that give a percentage boost to the team's banked Wumpa upon deposit. They are also very good at uncovering Relics, which when deposited at Relic Stations, activate a specific power to that location.

This is the current breakdown of roles per character:

• Scorers: Crash, Tawna, Catbat
• Blockers: Dingodile, Dr. N. Brio, Dr. N. Tropy
  
• Boosters: Coco and Dr. Neo Cortex
  

What's nice about the roles is that while these are the specialization for each character (and fulfilling those shortens ability cooldowns), they are still pretty versatile. Crash, thanks to his mobility and how much fruit he can carry, is a natural scorer. But his tankiness and offensive output make him just fine for other roles, too. Players can have multiple copies of the same character on a team if they so want, but it could hamper them against a balanced squad.

Each character also gets to pick an individual power from a list before a match and it charges over the course of a game. Combining the right few powers is just as important as character team composition itself. One, for example, can add score bonuses when banking fruit if timed well.

It all adds up to a fun-feeling experience for all ages, with a deep-as-desired bit of strategy available for more competitive players. What's extremely impressive is the sheer playmaking ability each player grasps in their hands at all times, be it the ability to shut down an entire team or stringing together a handful of abilities to score a massive amount of points at once.

Games are pretty quick-feeling in pace and the ability for anyone on the map to make a huge game-swinging play creates an irresistible gameplay loop that eats up a ton of time, quickly.

Multiplayer and More

One of the more interesting things about Crash Team Rumble is the map design and how each flows. There is a varying bit of verticality to each map and one of the little hidden joys—and surefire game-deciders at higher skill levels—is figuring out how to optimally route through each stage.

Balance can be a fickle thing in a game like this—or a complete afterthought given the semi-casual slant to the genre of mascot party games.

But balance here is actually really impressive. Scorers, fittingly for their role, usually have some nice movement abilities that make them more elusive than the other classes. Using those cooldowns at the right time can lead to big plays—think, sprinting down the court on a fastbreak for a dunk.

Blockers, if one manages the cooldowns properly, can sit on an opponent's bank for a longtime. If there's a drawback, it's that one can assume most players won't want to play this role, strictly, which could cause some problems in online matches.

Boosters are by far the most complex and might end up being the most popular characters in competitive scenes. It's very hard to understate how important it is for one of them to round up Gems that increase the number of fruit gained when a scorer reaches the bank.

More important, though, is the ability to more quickly gather Relics than the other two classes, cashing them in for power-ups at stations. There are huge in swinging a game. There are too many to take the time to list here, but as an example—one adds another bank for the Booster's team that doubles Wumpa scoring until it goes away.

One can begin to see how proper communication with teammates and the timing of a Booster's abilities in tandem with the Scorer can swing games massively.

This being a multiplayer game, how it chooses to split or keep playlists together for a healthy player population matters. As such, the game puts everyone in a competitive matchmaking playlist, with the only other modes being private matches and practice against bots.

The practice mode isn't a bad way for new players to learn and the private matchmaking is a welcome feature on the chance the game really develops serious competitive legs. Keeping everyone else in the same matchmaking pool is probably a good idea to keep wait times between games down, even with cross-play.

The game does offer a solid onboarding process for new players, which is fitting for the simplistic-but-deep nature of it. There's a nice, quick tutorial at the start and character-specific options screens not unlike those found in a fighting game.

Crash Team Rumble boasts the expected number of options tucked into the menus, too.

Where the game might lose some players is the fact that this is technically a live-service effort complete with a battle pass. It's a mixed bag in this regard, as progression feels slow but players are already handed the premium pass for the first season when purchasing the base game.

The long and short of the battle pass is that players can earn emotes, skins, and accessories for characters on this pass. How it gets further monetized post-launch, if at all, will be something to watch.

Still, players can earn additional cosmetics on top of the battle pass by playing a specific character and the act of actually unlocking additional playable characters isn't tied to any of the microtransactions.

Conclusion

Crash Team Rumble has the makings of a sleeper hit if it can attract its audience. It's a fun, fast experience that is fairly unique, though it's also swimming in a deep sea of live-service multiplayer games.

It's difficult to say what the long-term shelf life on Crash Team Rumble is, but its unique effort should be rewarded with a big audience. An eyebrow-raising amount of depth to its multiplayer strategies for team-based showdowns doesn't hit the market too often.

Strictly as a mascot party game likely sandwiched between main-line entries in a beloved series? Crash Team Rumble is a massive success that fans will love, if not bringing more new players to the series in the process.