The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Do you remember Yaris? Man, what an abysmal game. How about Doritos Dash of Destruction? Passable, but not great. These tie-in free XBLA games have not had a good track record.

However, I’m here to tell you that Doritos Crash Course is actually fairly fantastic, and totally worth a download and quick playthrough. It’ll only take you maybe an hour to enjoy all the content, but it’ll be a good hour! It’s a lot of fun.

The premise of the game is a game show along the lines of a Takahashi’s Castle or that new show I’ve heard of called Wipeout. Your avatar is a contestant on an obstacle course, and you have to run and jump your way through to the end and try to get the best time you can.
What this amounts to is a fairly well designed bit of speed platforming. You have to dodge timed traps and use conveyor belts to your advantage to get past obstacles, all the while trying to go as fast as possible. There are tons of checkpoints, so it never really gets frustrating, even though some of the later challenges can get a bit hard. There are three locations with five levels each, and they’re all pretty fun.

This is a great use of Avatars, mostly because they actually took the time to animate them well. They don’t seem plastered in in this game. They seem like they were actually made for this game, which is huge. I hadn’t seen that before. It was cool to see my avatar, rocking her Grant City PD shirt as she died over and over because I suck at platforming. It works!

Other than that, though, this is nothing you haven’t seen before, and there are plenty of better platforming challenges out there. For example, Splosion Man, which I’ve been slowly working through. But for the price of free, the game is totally worth letting yourself get distracted with it. The Doritos branding is only in the title, and not really anywhere else, so that’s not obnoxious. It’s even smart enough to have integrated friend leaderboards to maybe help you eek out a few extra minutes of free fun. The content runs out before it gets boring (unlike Dash of Destruction) and I had a good time all the way through. It has some sort of multiplayer too, though I haven’t tried it, but hey, that also might be fun.

It’s a fantastic little game that actually might be worth a buck. But it’s not. It’s free. So just download it already. At least you’ll have fun mining for free achievements.