With the furore surrounding the upcoming Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, many fans are probably journeying back through the bandicoot’s earlier outings in preparation—maybe some fan games, too. Whether you’re familiar with the series’ manic levels and boss battles or not, there’s one thing you’ll soon realize if you dive in: they’re no cakewalk. Those fiendish death routes, gem challenges and relics are not for the faint-hearted.
Kart racer Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is no exception. Unlike Mario Kart, it has quite an extensive single-player component, along with some fiendish challenges to beat. The Relic Races see the player speeding around a track by themselves, blasting through boxes in an attempt to score the fastest time and earn a relic. Some tracks’ relics are notoriously difficult to acquire. Here are ten with some of the hardest platinum relic times in the game!
10 Mystery Caves
Mystery Caves, like Coco Park, is one of the game’s short, simple, yet deceptively challenging tracks. Some of those bends are very tight, and the timing of the turtles is very easy to mess up just slightly. In Platinum Relic Races, getting a less-than-perfect jump from one of these little critters is enough to miss the cut-off, and, if that happens on the last lap of an otherwise-perfect run, it’s just devastating.
Having said that, this stage’s crates are placed in quite a player-friendly fashion, making that precious 10 second time reduction for hitting them all a practical and helpful goal to shoot for.
9 Dragon Mines
Dragon Mines, too, is a relatively short track. The issue here is that it’s packed with awkward sections and completely unique hazards—those darn mine carts—placed for no other reason than to attempt to ruin a high score chaser’s day.
The saving grace, again, is that those crates will be your best friend. Some are counterintuitively placed, but practising the route and getting the most troublesome ones early should allow you to glide through the rest quite comfortably. Just be sure not to waste time as you traverse that awful rising, curving turn. It’s no stairway to heaven, that’s for darn sure.
8 Crash Cove
Now, Crash Cove is the first track in the game. As a result, you might expect it to be a brief, comfortable, get-to-grips-with-the-basics sort of track. You know, something simple like Mario Kart’s Moo Moo Meadows. While this is certainly true to an extent, Crash Cove still packs a punch.
There are no real hazards to speak of here, but, being such a short track, it has a very demanding time for platinum trophy seekers to contend with. Gaining and maintaining boosts is the key to success here.
7 Electron Avenue
Unlike the rest of the tracks we’ve seen so far, Electron Avenue was not featured in the original Crash Team Racing. This futuristic map looks like one of Captain Falcon’s old haunts, making its debut in Crash Nitro Kart. It’s experienced quite a glow-up in the transition to Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, offering a stiff challenge to boot.
It’s a long and winding track, offering times that seem very generous for its relics (4:15:00 or better for a Sapphire down to 3:45:00 for a platinum). Don’t get complacent, though, because this is the most involved track we’ve seen in this rundown so far, and a simple mistake can set the player back a long way. Watch those bends!
6 Out Of Time
This next track also originates from Crash Nitro Kart. In its new iteration, it’s very reminiscent of Cortex Castle—more on that little doozy later—with a redesigned interior that smacks of a castle of yore. It’s also quite a long and complex route, offering difficult twists and turns alongside some deceptive jumps.
The thematically similar Tick-Tock Clock from Mario Kart fame has nothing on this track. Experience and practice are key here, as is the case with all Relic Races, because it can be very tough to maintain your speed with all the treacherous track-edges in the desert portions if you don’t take the shortcuts, jumps, and corners perfectly. Once you have this down, you’ll have a much better time. With that in mind, Out Of Time takes the middle spot on our list.
5 Sewer Speedway
Sewer Speedway isn’t an especially long track, nor is it Crash Cove or Coco Park short. In its average span, though, it manages to pack in enough annoying little segments to ruin a player’s entire decade. With those infuriating rolling drums and the fiendish jump into the shortcut that only decides to work whenever the heckola it feels like it, Sewer Speedway can be a rough, rough time.
Even so, there’s an important thing to bear in mind here: in terms of the route through the track itself, it’s relatively forgiving, rewarding experienced and skilled players with ample opportunities to build up and maintain their speed. With wide, smooth bends and a lot of jumps, it’s a playground for great players. It’s a bit of a nightmare getting to that point, though, hence this track’s placement.
4 Cortex Castle
Well, the dastardly Dr. Cortex wasn’t going to make things easy for us, was he? One of the last tracks in the game, Cortex Castle is an excellent test of a player’s driving skill, with various awkward sections that demand expert techniques to cruise through without losing precious time. The long jump to a short, tight turn at the end of a lap is an easy one to mess up, while the turning to get into the castle in the first place is impossibly sharp.
Couple this with the fact that the time to beat for a platinum relic is very fast indeed (1:32:00), and this is an all-around bad time. For our wumpa fruit, only the three remaining relic races are harder.
3 Papu’s Pyramid
Papu’s Pyramid is an iconic track, an homage to one of the feeblest bosses in Crash Bandicoot history. Papu Papu himself may be nothing more than a stick-waving punching bag, but his track is nothing to trifle with.
Making your way around the pyramid itself involves some of the most devious corners in the game, but that’s just the start of things. Some of these darn crates are placed more fiendishly than the insta-death spikes of the Mega Manseries, requiring some very awkward and counter-intuitive routes to be taken through each lap to nab them all. It’s not always necessary to grab them all for the time reduction, but it’s all but required here.
2 Gingerbread Joyride
With a name like Gingerbread Joyride, you might expect this to be a harmless track found in Barney the Dinosaur’s Cutesy, Innocent Kart Racer For Pre-Teens. It absolutely isn’t, though. For some players, this is Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled at its most devious.
Gingerbread Joyride is brand new for Nitro-Fueled, making its debut in the Winter Festival Grand Prix. For quite a long and sharp-twisty track, its platinum relic time is also a very tight one, meaning that perfect lines and the most efficient route through the time crates is critical here. In terms of requiring mastery of the mechanics, this could be the most difficult track Beenox created for the game. We’d argue that there’s one more classic track that beats it to the top spot, though.
1 N. Gin Labs
As with Gingerbread Joyride, N. Gin Labs’ platinum trophy is gated behind a time that seems laughably low for a track of its length. Immediately, then, the goal is a daunting one: hit all of the time crates for a bonus while perfectly navigating one of the game’s longest and most complex tracks.
There’s just so much about N. Gin Labs that’s super tough. Who the heck placed that huge cluster of crates right at the end of the lap? Why are the rest of them so spread out? How did that huge can manage to crush me from there? If you haven’t perfected the art of expert techniques like maintaining boosts, you’re simply not on this level yet.
NEXT: Crash Bandicoot: 10 Hardest Time Trial Relics In The N. Sane Trilogy, Ranked
