(XBLA) Doritos Crash Course

Posted 2 years ago By - Curtis McDonald

As the year comes to a close, the Doritos Unlock Xbox challenge is also winding to a close. The Unlock Xbox challenge is now down to two finalists; both of which are available on XBL Arcade for free! For our American cousins, once you’ve played them, head back to your Dashboard and select the Doritos Unlock Xbox advertisement. Once there, vote for your favorite game. The winner will be announced on Dec. 29th.

The second finalist in the Unlock Xbox challenge is Doritos Crash Course. Crash Course was developed by Wanako Games, a subsidiary of BeHaviour Interactive and is very likely to be a polarizing game for anyone who plays it. Take one part Japanese game show and one part Trials HD and throw in a little XBL Avatar and you have Doritos Crash Course. Sound like your kind of thing? I thought so as well and was quite excited to play! Unfortunately I have finally found a game that can make me rage-quit - something I thought myself immune to. So if you have high blood pressure or anger management issues, you may want to avoid Crash Course at all costs for you are likely to end up having a stroke or throwing your controller through your television.

The basic premise of Crash Course is very simple, run from the starting point all the way to the left and reach the finish line in the shortest possible time. Between the start and finish are any number of obstacles and traps you must navigate. There are checkpoints along the way and if knocked off course, you will restart at your last checkpoint, but the timer never stops! The controls are very basic; run left and right with the left stick, A is jump, pushing down will cause you to slide and the left trigger is sprint. Be careful when sprinting, do it for too long and your avatar will loose his balance and topple, costing you valuable time...or worse! Also, if you are stuck you can hit the right bumper to skip to the next section of the course, but your time will not be counted.

Doritos Crash Course was designed to be played with your XBL avatars and the graphical quality is on par with others of the like, which is to say that they are perfectly adequate. The audio is likewise apt but not ambitious. There are three ‘countries’ in which to race, the USA, Europe and Japan. Each country has 5 courses and that country’s respective courses have a style and design of their own which helps to keep things fresh.

Unfortunately for this reviewer, when it comes right down to it, Doritos Crash Course is just far too frustrating to be fun. The game starts off quite easy and enjoyable but rapidly moves into the realm of maddening and rage inducing. Unlike similar games - Trials HD for instance - Crash Course is not really dependent on skill or even on practice, it is more about garbage luck and fast reactions. The controls are muddy and the later courses are downright cheap with chaotic obstacles that require far more luck than skill to navigate. The multiplayer consists of a single player race with a sort of flying contraption that shows where the competition is in relation to you.

Conclusion

Crash Course is part of the Unlock Xbox challenge and as such is currently available to download for free from the XBL Arcade. I recommend this game for the early levels; the USA and Europe courses. There is definitely some fun to be had and the later levels, the Japanese courses, will likely be fun for those out there that have a touch of the masochist in them or like a hell of a challenge. But for me, who prefers his blood vessels un-exploded, this is not a fun game.