Nitro-Fueled is an excellent racing game and an excellent remake of a classic. It’s gameplay rewards player’s skill and it’s great success is to always make the player come back for more while gradually improving their performance.

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled on the Switch is my favorite kart racer, even managing to outshine Mario Kart. The focus on tight and challenging gameplay that requires skill over luck was a nice change of pace. Add to that the great presentation and amount of content, and there's not much else that you could wish for. At this point, the only real complaints are the long loading screens, the microtransactions that Activision is rolling out, and the sometimes-broken multiplayer component. It's enough to make it anything but a perfect game, but it's a good title, especially for the $40 price tag.

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled has the thrilling speed and the addictive gameplay of the original and adds a metric ton of extra content for fans and newcomers to enjoy. Whether you’re new to the frantic frenzy of Crash Team Racing or you’ve been hankering for a chance to play as Nitros Oxide himself, there’s a whole lot of things to love.

It’s always going to be a tough ask going up against the near-perfect Mario Kart 8, but Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled is an excellent kart racing alternative for those looking for something different. It looks great, packs plenty of great content and offers and quality kart racing experience. There’s certainly a learning curve, and some cheap AI and painful loading times can be frustrating, but there’s a lot of fun to be had here regardless of whether you have nostalgic memories for the 90s original or not.

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is a fast, frantic and rewarding kart racer that’s generously packed with a wealth of content. Its long load times and difficulty spikes may prove frustrating but it’s never enough to detract from what is otherwise a brilliant remaster and another strong addition to the Switch’s slowly growing lineup of racers.

I can’t shake the feeling that if Nintendo’s online infrastructure was more robust, the loading minimized, and the coins were able to be earned when offline, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled would be an instant masterpiece and torch-bearer for remakes of beloved games. Sadly, it falls just short of such a title.

While the roughshod nature of the Switch port doesn’t quite make Crash Team Racing a dominant kart racer on the system, the solid single-player mode and finicky yet rewarding boosting and driving still adds up to an enjoyable time, as long as you’re fine with a visual downgrade and a long wait between races. I really enjoyed revisiting Crash Team Racing with Nitro-Fueled and it reminded me of how great the single-player component of this game is. I just wish there weren’t such large caveats that held it back on Switch.