Throughout the last while, Doritos held a competition for independent developers, where they would compete to see who could create the best game(s.) Out of the two winners, one was Crash Course, which they released on XBOX Live Arcade for free in early December. It is not only an incredibly nice gesture and gift, but it's also an excellent marketing idea employed by Doritos (who have done this before with the release of Dash of Destruction a couple of years ago.)
Crash Course is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It's a game where you run your personal avatar through insane obstacle courses that are suspended in the air above water. There are three different continents (U.S.A., Europe and Japan,) with five courses each. Each course is full of different obstacles (which keep getting tougher as you progress,) including trampolines, swinging hammers, metal presses and collapsing floor panels. Your objective is to get to the end the fastest way possible, without being hit, flattened or falling into the water. Luckily, there are checkpoints after each section, so it's not overly frustrating and allows you to focus on each section as they come, in order to get better.
The control scheme is very basic. All you really need to do is run (RT,) jump (A) and be able to move, climb and slide (using the left joystick.) It works very well and is quite tight. In the time that I've spent playing the game, I haven't had any issues where the controls made me screw up, which is nice. Normally, controls can be hit or miss in this type of game.
Although its visuals aren't anything to write home about, the game looks decent overall. It has some okay texture work and detailed backgrounds that set each continent's venues apart. For example, there's a background for a USA course that features King Kong attacking a building. The backgrounds are the best visual aspect of the game because most of the courses look alike, apart from different colour schemes based on which area you're in.
As its description suggests, Crash Course is a challenging game. It has a great, subtle learning curve, though. As you progress through the United States courses and onto the other two continents, you will become familiar with the game and will be able to handle the tougher obstacles and courses in general, without feeling like the game ramped up the difficulty far too fast.
Crash Course has full leaderboard support and online multiplayer, although it's very basic. When you play against friends or other online foes, you will only see a cardboard cut-out of their avatar being flown around the course, in conjunction with the speed/efficiency that they are traversing the obstacles. It's funny at first and works quite well, but it's just as fun to compete against your friends' times through the leaderboard than it is in a versus race.
Overall, Doritos Crash Course is a really fun, challenging and hilarious game. It's very simple in design, but they did a good job developing the game and its control scheme. It's a great addition to your XBOX Arcade game collection, especially since it's free. This is a game that you do not want to pass up on downloading because who knows how long it will last (previous free games were deleted after specific periods of time.) Make sure to play it with friends (or challenge friends online,) because that's where the game really shines.
Rating: 7.5/10
Doritos Crash Course was released on December 8, 2010, for the XBOX Live Arcade. It is free to download.
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