Preview: Crash Team Rumble’s beta on PS5, PS4 offers an incomplete helping of Wumpa

Crash Bandicoot doesn’t have the greatest pedigree when it comes to spin-off video games. Crash Team Racing is a great classic and deserves its recognition, but titles like Crash Bash, Crash boom bang, and Crash Tag Team Racing are pretty forgettable. After playing the recent closed beta, while not a lot, we feel pretty safe in saying that you can add Crash Team Rumble to that list.

Crash Team Rumble is a 4v4 game built around the idea of ​​collecting 2,000 Wumpa Fruits faster than the opposition. Everyone runs around the arena smashing boxes and occasionally grabbing relics that can be used to activate special pads for the map you’re playing. Examples include bounce pads, rolling ball power-ups, and Oxide or Uka Uka coming to attack. Your team can increase their Wumpa input by taking control of Gem Platforms.

With the rules above, Crash Team Rumble isn’t a bad game by any means, but it’s pretty basic. It feels like a game that was originally conceived as a side mode in Crash Bandicoot 4: it’s about time it was forced to become its own thing. The matches are fast, and there’s a certain level of fun, but it’s not something that made us want to come back to it again and again. Sometimes, we forced ourselves to keep playing. More often than not, our games were a blast. A team gets rolling, and stopping that momentum seems almost impossible.

The same visual treats as in It’s About Time are here, with each character looking and behaving as you’d expect, but still feeling like a level of charm is missing. Letters are divided into three categories. Crash and Tawna are Scorers, characters dedicated to catching and banking Wampas. Dingodil is a blocker looking to tank up and stop the enemy team, and Coco and Cortex are boosters looking to support the team through relic use. Early on, Dingodil was the character we dreaded. If they’ve positioned themselves at your gate and you’re playing Crash, you might as well run around and waste time until a teammate can come to your aid. This health difference is too much for you to do anything on your own.

As a live service game that will cost you to get started, Crash Team Rumble may struggle to gain a dedicated player base. It has a battle pass that rises incredibly slowly. There seem to be a lot of cosmetic rewards for equipping your chosen character, but hopefully they speed up XP accumulation by launch, as it’s very slow in the beta.

Coming from It’s About Time, Crash Team Rumble is a new direction for Bandicoot that we can appreciate for the innovation. That being said, there’s a limited chance it will demand your time when it’s released. It will have more characters and maps at launch, but nothing that changes anyone’s opinion of it right now.

Crash Team Rumble is set to launch on PS5 and PS4 on June 20, 2023 for $29.99/£24.99. What did you think of the closed beta? Are you excited to play this multiplayer spin-off? Slide into the comments section below.