 Woo Hoo! As soon as that maniacal marsupial Crash Bandicoot spins onto your mobile screen with his trademark theme song you know you’re in for a wild and woolly ride. Vivendi Games Mobile and Polarbit have brought Crash and his cohorts to 3D life on your mobile device in Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D and in the process have sent a warning shot across the bow of Nintendo.
With more and more kids at a younger age walking around with more powerful cell phones with bigger and better screens the market is expanding exponentially for better 3D mobile games. One lap around N-Sanity Island will convince you that while Nintendo may lead the pack in casual on-the-go gaming, mobile devices have closed the gap and are poised for a strong second lap.
  
The graphics are bright, crisp and colorful on my N73 comparable to the Nintendo graphics according to my 12-yr-old son. As you race these wacky characters around the 12 fun-filled tracks you will encounter new and delightful sights everywhere as you go from N-Sanity Island to the desert to a spectacular outer space level with stops in between. There are loads of moving objects that need to be avoided like meteorites, rolling logs, spaceships and swinging rocks while others are benign like drifting clouds and blimps. All of them give life and vitality to the races. Although it’s a cartoon game, these tracks are some of the finest racing layouts you can find on a mobile device. The rolling banked turns, swooping down slopes, jumps, shortcuts, caverns and ramps all give you a great racing experience.
  
Once you get over the sterling graphics and tracks, you’ll realize that Crash 3D is accompanied by glorious sound FX and music, a weakness in mobile games. The audio is everywhere as you rev your engine, screech around corners, crash through boxes and pick up bonuses that spin like slot machines and land on your weapon of chance which you can use to blow up your opponents. Also layered on top of all this SFX is well-fitting music. In its own way, the audio is up there with the likes of Brothers in Arms/Earned in Blood, Doom and the Asphalt series for handhelds.
  
Scattered throughout the tracks are bonus boxes that give you weapons or upgrades like speed boosts or shields. There are also boost pads on the tracks. The weapons can be a little tricky to use as you need to line up with your target for a sure hit unless you’re lucky enough to pick up a missile that locks on.
  
The heart of the game is in the Cup races and Story mode. The Cup races are 3 sets of 4 races with increasing difficulty where you earn a cumulative score. While the drive is to win each set it isn’t essential as all the tracks are available. The Story mode is more difficult as you need to beat each story to advance. These stories may have you destroying a rival 3 times or picking up 10 wumpas while winning the race. The 9 stories come with slightly different layouts and sights.
  
The game plays super fast. So fast that at times it becomes difficult to follow the track. Even the load times are fast. The controls are very kart-like and responsive and they can be remapped to your keypad although I couldn’t get them to remap to my d-pad/joystick. Being that the fire command is mapped to the * key this led to some 2-handed game play. The difficulty, especially in the later part of the Story mode becomes hard enough that I hand to enlist my son to finish them due to my poor reflexes. He welcomed the chance and now I’m having a hard time locating my cell.
  
Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D is the king of mobile kart racing and a lot of game for $10. As such, it gets 5 *. It nudges cell phone games into territory normally reserved for dedicated gaming devices with the added benefit that you can take a call in the middle of a race.
Reviewed by Goyami on Nokia N73
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