If there's one thing Crash Bandicoot is known for in particular, it's sadistic difficulty. If you play for long enough, you're guaranteed to run into a level that will burn Crash's accursed "WOAH!" into your brain. Hope you've got plenty of lives!
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Crash Bandicoot (1996)
- The first real indication of the game's difficulty is Level 8, Native Fortress, which concludes the first island. It is much longer than any level before it, has omnipresent Bottomless Pits, sections where you ascend vertically and have to spin timed platforms to set them, and should you fall down, you need to start over that part, and is full of enemies. The gem is really nasty one, because, besides the obligatory No Death Run, you have to acquire the red gem first to get access to some boxes, and others are hidden behind the background where you can jump on certain points.
- Level 14, Sunset Vista: you need to do the whole thing in one life, and you don't know how many boxes you missed until you've already finished the level. This makes a lot of levels just nightmarish to get a gem on, but Sunset Vista is a huge hard level with a couple hard-to-see crates that really takes the cake.
- There was going to be a follow-up level that was even harder. Luckily, this level was cut from the game and was later unearthed by hackers. Then again, prototype Sunset Vista was, somehow, even more insanely difficult, so it balances out.
- This game also has a streak of difficult levels in the third island: The High Road (level 19), Jaws of Darkness (level 22), The Lab (level 24), and Fumbling in the Dark (level 27, or secret level 2). They have annoying enemies, hard jumps, dark areas, and bottomless pits everywhere. If you can even beat these levels, let alone get the gems from these areas, you should be proud of yourself for accomplishing one of the hardest goals in a game ever.
- Level 16, Cortex Power: One of the most unholy examples of Fake Difficulty ever conceived. Camera Screw, multiple forks in the road, backtracking, and being forced to do it in ONE life if you want even a chance for the gem makes for one of the most difficult levels in games and a high rate of broken TVs.
- Level 18, Toxic Waste: You must avoid barrels being thrown at you as you run down the path, and there are very few areas to hide. Later on, there are bouncing barrels coming down at you, and it takes hundreds of tries and deaths in order to learn and memorize their movement patterns, and how you can get underneath the barrels without being flattened.
- Level 20, Slippery Climb: It has little fixed ground and thus you'll be mostly walking and jumping between platforms floating in every possible direction and moving oversized birds. Even stationary ground is mostly covered by Surprise Slide Staircases with Spikes of Doom or Bottomless Pits at their end. The worst is the second part, which has platforms floating in erratic pattern with varying speed, timing jump on which can be difficult. And this fairly long level has only one checkpoint (two if you collected all bonus round tokens).
- Like Sunset Vista, Slippery Climb also had a removed follow-up, this one named Stormy Ascent. On one hand, it does have three checkpoints. On the other, everything that made Slippery Climb a horrible level to get through is squared in this one, complete with long bits that you have to complete in one go because pausing for a single second means plummeting. These include stretches where the only things saving you from hitting spikes are birds that can go below them and die when bounced on, platforms that move insanely fast, and extremely erratic platform movement on the last third. This one was removed precisely because of its horrible difficulty, though it's still possible to access through Gameshark; those who have played it report it might just be the hardest level in the series as a whole. This level was eventually released as a level proper in the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, as optional DLC. And it's definitely deserving of that reputation. Reports claim that Vicarious Visions had one of their best players lose no less than sixty lives trying to clear it for the first time, and even the very person who DESIGNED Stormy Ascent in the first place had trouble with it.
- The N. Sane Trilogy has made two levels that weren't considered that hard in the original Crash 1 into That One Level: Road to Nowhere and The High Road. While certainly no walks in the park in 1996, it's now much easier to fall in between the gaps in the bridge, forcing the players' jumps to be absolutely precise. This article
explains why. In short, Crash falls slightly faster and his hitbox is pill-shaped rather than cube-shaped, meaning it's possible for him to slip off after having just made it. - The N-Sane Trilogy fixes a few things with the stages, but these fixes can actually make things harder:
- Checkpoints now remember the boxes you've broken, so previously infuriating levels like Native Fortress, Sunset Vista and the "Elite Four" on the third island aren't as gruelling to 100%... but the exceptions are the Coloured Gems. Those still require you do it all in a single run, presumably to replicate the "Skull Route" challenges in Crash 2 and Warped (which is how you get most of the Coloured Gems in those games). As such, The Lost City, Generator Room, Lights Out, Toxic Waste, Slippery Climb and The Lab retain their original difficulty and become this trope in comparison to most of the other levels.
- You can now retry Bonus Rounds as much as you like... but this means that their boxes are now required to get the Gem. This makes certain Bonus Rounds much more difficult because you can't just ignore everything and go straight for the exit. This especially applies to the Bonus Round in The Lost City, which features a long line of Quadruple Bounce Boxes that are just about impossible to bounce through perfectly.
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
- Warp Room 4 in general is practically That One Hub Room, especially if you're going for all the Gems. It has Cold Hard Crash, Bee-Having, Diggin' It, and Ruination, which is one of the toughest levels in the game already for a few reasons and has a difficult secret area to boot. The only level in there that isn't nasty is level 16, Hangin' Out, and even it has an easy-to-miss secret area.
- Level 17, Diggin' It: this if you're going for 100% Completion. Like Cold Hard Crash, it has a split path Death Route containing some boxes, which means Backtracking. But here it is not a sidescroller, so you'll have to run towards the camera at least on one occasion. Additionally, you'll have to do this through the segments with bees. And yes, bees always start chasing Crash even if he comes from the opposite direction, meaning the sound will be your only clue to spin them off. Oh, and beehives cannot be destroyed.
- Level 18, Cold Hard Crash: a nightmare if you're trying to get the "destroy all crates" Gem. You have to play through the first half of the level without dying to reach the Death Course, a difficult, checkpoint-free path covered in crusher traps and nitro mines, almost entirely on slippery ice. When you reach the end of the death course, you need to activate a switch and do the course BACKWARDS to get the new crate the switch spawns at the beginning of the level, at which point you take the platform back to the main level and complete it. Oh, and there's a single, hard-to-find crate hidden just offscreen. Missed it? DO THE WHOLE THING OVER AGAIN. It's at this point one will wonder if that stack of steel crates that suspiciously resembles a hand giving the middle finger to the player really is just a coincidental shape.
- Level 20, Bee-Having: It's a mountain-ish level with various nasty enemies like plants that spit explosive seeds and lumberjack androids that can flatten you with their hammers, but none of that matters, because in this level, you'll be too busy worrying about your biggest threat: the bees. Throughout the level are beehives that will spawn bees when you walk past them. Diggin' It had the same theme, same enemies, and it also had bees, but there, the bees came out one at a time. Here, the hives spawn FIVE bees at once, and unless you time a spin perfectly, you won't be able to kill them all and will get hit by the one or two bees that you missed. You can outrun them or get away entirely by digging underground, but if you don't have any ground to dig under (which, coincidentally, usually happens when you have electric fences and seed-spitting plants to deal with as well) ...hope you have pretty good timing. You will learn to dread that ominous "buzzzZZZZ..." sound that means a new swarm of bees just appeared. The secret area is no picnic either.
- Level 21, Piston It Away: just sadistic. The ordinary level is irritating enough as is. Except the developers chose to go "Screw you!" and make you run almost to the end of the level, break one box, and run back to the second checkpoint, if you want either gem. The problem with this is that you can't actually die. You need to go through the level, backtrack (mercifully, it is a side-scrolling stage), and then survive the Death Route if you want either of the two gems. Furthermore, you have to remember to keep a particular enemy alive when you go through for the first time, so you can use it to bounce back up a steep wall on the trip back to the Death Route; of course, most players won't think to do this and will just kill the enemy right away since it's a normal, unremarkable enemy, only to find that there's no way to backtrack past that steep wall without it, forcing them to start the whole level over. The pain of this level can be alleviated somewhat by entering the Death Route right away and immediately dying - doing so will teleport you back to the main level but also guarantees the Death Route platform will stay there forever, so you only need to complete the first section of the level without dying. It also helps to save the Bonus Level for the return trip, as it acts as a checkpoint when completed and is very close to the Death Route.
- The game has its two jetpack levels, Rock It (level 22) and Pack Attack (level 24), found in the final world. They have terribly floaty controls and are especially annoying when getting the clear gems.
Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped
- The original version of Hot Coco wasn't a cakewalk: the draw distance wasn't especially far on the PS1, making it a pain to scout through the level and find that one box you were missing since they wouldn't appear until you were pretty close to them. However, N. Sane Trilogy turns the secret level even worse, due to physics changes that make Coco's jetski handle much more realistically. While entering the level itself is much easier (thanks to a bird splatting into the sign that warps you there), the level itself asks you to navigate a sandbox-style ocean. All you need to do to leave is drive to a Nitro switch on the other side of the level to clear the way to the exit behind where you started. But you get nothing just for doing this; you can only get the Gem by destroying every crate in the level, most of which are right next to awkwardly-placed gauntlets of Nitro crates and mines, so even if you destroy the Nitros first you'll still have a tough time, as the altered physics mean it's very easy to slip and slide into said mines. And there are no Aku Aku crates (to prevent you from just driving through the Nitro crates blocking the exit). It gets even harder in Time Trial mode, as you must figure out the fastest route to and from the Nitro switch, and which Time Crates are worth going out of your way for.
- Mad Bombers. Unforgiving even for being in the last warp hub. You're flying Crash on a biplane and your objective is to destroy five planes. Unlike in the previous flying level with Coco, however, shooting blindly at vehicles itself is not enough. To destroy the plane, you have to snipe two tiiiiny engines on each before the plane falls to its doom. Consider the awkward targeting that's determined by where the plane is pointing, and you have a pretty frustrating level on your hands. This not even mentioning that the enemy planes can shred your plane to scrap in seconds.
- Someone at Vicarious Visions apparently thought the platforming stages in the original Warped were too easy, and so created Future Tense, a (thankfully optional) DLC level. It's based on a cut level from the original game, which explains the Nintendo Hard difficulty, but expects you to have the Double Jump, Tornado Spin AND the Bazooka moves! The level is extremely long, taking roughly seven-to-eight minutes to complete, and is chock-full of spike traps, awkward conveyor belts, spike traps ON awkward conveyor belts, a lengthy section towards the end where you have to dodge missiles coming at you from the foreground while jumping across timed platforms, and box placement designed to trick you into committing suicide. Plus, if you want either Gem, you have to get through the entire first half of the level without dying, shoot out an Iron ! Crate hidden off-screen BEHIND an elevator so it spawns a bounce crate you need, climb up through a perilous laser/conveyor belt obstacle course - again, without dying - and reach the Death Route; which is, of course, even harder, and contains several boxes which you need for one of the Gems, as a throwback to the Death Routes from Crash 2. Of note are a pair of boxes contained in the Death Route which are floating in a gap between two conveyor belts going in opposite directions, with timed lasers above them and missiles being fired at you from the other side - even shooting them out with the Fruit Bazooka is a pain since you need to stand still to do it, and they're placed just low enough that you practically have to be right on the edge to even hit them; and you could easily smash them only to fall into the abyss which must be bounced across on TNT Crates, or get blown up while Matrix-dodging missiles in mid-air, sending you right back to the Death Route's one and only checkpoint at the start. Even the Bonus Level is pretty tough, as you have to figure out the right order in which to do things - and you can't waste any time doing so, as it involves safely smashing switching ?/TNT Crates - or you'll wind up locked out of several crates and need to start over. And then you have to RUSH through all this in the Time Trials...
Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex
- Any level where you play as Coco, as she handles significantly worse than Crash (indeed, Level 26 is Crash's Level 11, except edited so Coco can complete it).
- The Blue Gem pathway in Tsunami, filled as it is with single-block-wide platforms above instant-kill water arranged in such a way that you often have to jump diagonally from one to the next), among other things. The Red Gem pathway in Banzai Bonzai is almost just as bad, being filled with tons of Nitro crates instead.
- Level 13, Smokey and the Bandicoot: somehow more difficult than Area 51 in Warped. The relic challenge is easier, but that is the only mercy given here. The jeep you are given handles like a shopping cart that is filled with rocks, which makes even getting the crystal a challenge, and the recommended strategy for getting the gem is to go as slow as possible. And the handling ensures that you'll still miss some boxes. Did I mention there are 17 (non-secret) levels to go?
- Level 19, Coral Canyon: Underwater levels in Crash Bandicoot games tend to be on the annoying side already (thank goodness they all play entirely in 2D), but this one is probably the worst of the bunch, though it's not as evil as some of the other examples here. It is full of dangers that can seemingly come out of nowhere if you haven't memorized the level layout (the submarine can be killed by contact with a fish, for crying out loud), and it is long. The sheer length makes this one one of the most annoying levels in the game to do on Time Trial mode. At least the background music is pretty nice-sounding.
- Level 18, Crashteroids: It's basically Mad Bombers from Warped in space, as in you have to destroy specific parts of your targets (here it's necessary to shoot three shield generators of each of three space stations, then to shoot the stations themselves) and enemies have rapid-fire attacks that can destroy you fast. What makes is even worse is, of course, omnipresent asteroids, which deal massive damage or outright destroy your ship.
Crash Twinsanity
- Level 6, High Seas Hijinx: Firstly, it takes approximately thirty minutes to complete. It opens with large and annoying fields of nitro crates on slippy-slidey ice (and when a life crate is opened, even if this was because you hit a nitro crate and were instantly reduced to shrapnel, the life is lost until your next replay). After this, it moves on to crossing a series of semi-rotating platforms while rhinos that do Collision Damage swing around, seemingly just because that way they can be a nuisance; there are two life crates that can be accessed, but doing so will probably cost you at least three lives due to accessing the detonator crate to get a stack of nitros out of the way. After this, things settle down to merely annoying until you come to a water room with a huge axle just under the surface; you have to walk along the rotating bulges without falling into the water, and this will almost certainly lead to a nice time falling into the drink and dying instantly. After you've managed that you have to take on N. Gin himself by making him destroy his own crow's nest; the battle consists mainly of running in circles, and then being knocked over the edge by an explosion when you run afoul of the one gap in the spiked wall around the circumference of the battlefield and are unable to escape his rains of missiles. When Gin eventually plummets, you have to run away from a Super-Persistent Predator walrus chef along a massive field where no life crates you pick up will be worth what it does to your time, and by which point your thumb will hurt enough to interfere with your ability to control Crash. And when you've finally managed that? There's another boss fight that just comes out of nowhere on an iceberg that gets fractured before you've really gotten started. And if you run out of lives, you have to do it all over again from the slidey ice with nitros area.
Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time
- While the game as a whole has picked up a reputation for N. Sane difficulty, on par with if not surpassing the original title, there are a select few levels that seem especially reviled. One of these is Run It Bayou from Mosquito Marsh, the 5th dimension, roughly at the halfway point; a nasty Difficulty Spike, especially if you're going for 100% Completion, chiefly due to sadistic box placement, including a throwback to Crash 2 where you must defy common sense and ignore the surfboard to instead bounce across boxes floating in the water to reach the yellow gem. Then there's the lengthy section in the middle where you must ride a boat while smashing boxes (including a bounce crate that doesn't go anywhere and seemingly exists just to trick you), and the final surfboard section where it's extremely difficult if not impossible to go back and get boxes you missed due to the current. And of course, you could easily get through all of this only to find out you missed the boxes at the very beginning that were hidden off-screen behind steps, or the level's hidden gem which can only be accessed by hitting a ! crate hidden behind a non-descript barrel to create some metal boxes behind a non-descript tree off to the side of a non-descript bridge. On top of all this, it's the first level where the Flashback Tape - which requires you to get through the whole stage without dying to pick it up - is very far into the level; a taster of what is to come, as this becomes increasingly common in later levels.
- The level's Dingodile timeline version, No Dillo Dallying, isn't any easier; for starters, after finishing Dingodile's section, it expects you to complete basically the entire second half of the regular level, starting from the boat ride, an already hard section made even harder by trickier box placement (and if you thought the bounce crate from before now actually lead somewhere, you thought wrong). Thankfully, there's no Flashback Tapes on the timeline levels.
- Bears Repeating in the sixth dimension. After two Breather Levels spent introducing you to Kupuna-Wa's time-manipulation mechanics and a deceptively easy (by this game's standards) opening section, you then find yourself riding Polar once more, except now he's even faster and slippier, making hitting boxes about three times as hard as it was back in Crash 2; and once again, the Flashback Tape is wayyyyy into the level, in the midst of Polar's section, forcing you to re-do the entire first four-fifths of the level if you die once. This level also features a secret Yellow Gem path, containing an homage to The High Road from Crash 1 - yes, they brought back the infuriating broken bridge of doom, with everything that implies.
- Out For Launch, the first level of the 8th dimension, Bermugula's Orbit. It can be pretty tricky just to get through normally when playing for the first time, chiefly because it's the level that introduces Ika-Ika the Gravity Mask, and just halfway into the level you're thrown into the deep end with precise and unforgiving gravity-manipulation sections, littered with tricky box placement and plasma-toting Gasmoxians with the accuracy of a Jackal Sniper and a devious habit of baiting you into charging at them before shooting - and they sometimes hang about on the walls and ceilings, to boot. Needless to say, if you don't have a good grasp of how to use Ika-Ika when going into this level, you will by the time you finish.
- Out For Launch has a Cortex timeline version, Shipping Error, which may be the first seriously difficult non-Crash/Coco level in the game, particularly since you have to deal with the same tricky enemies as Cortex, with his more limited platforming abilities, plus ascending up narrow shafts while bouncing on enemies-turned-goo-platforms to turn other enemies, timed just right so you don't instead careen right into them. All of this pales in comparison to the room where you must hop across extremely fast-moving platforms using Cortex's dash, which requires you to dash into thin air and hope that the brief hang-time after using the dash will be enough to let you land on the next platform.
- Rock Blocked isn't that hard if you're going for 100% or even the Perfect Relic, the Platinum Relic however is a different story; it's hands down the most difficult platinum in the entire game to get because of how incredibly unforgiving the time requirement is. You basically have to take every single shortcut imaginable without getting slowed down even once and get invincibility to have even a fraction of a chance of getting the Platinum. Then to top it off, it's also by the far the buggiest level in the game with Dingodile having a tendency to randomly get stuck on the sides of those rising log platforms. Nothing worse than having a perfectly good run ruined because the game randomly decided to screw you over.
- Crash Landed is one of the longest levels in the game, and plays almost like a highlights reel of the most difficult parts of the game up to that point - the level is slick with ice physics sections, there's two parts where you must ride a schnurgle in auto-scrolling obstacle courses like Polar, there's a few sections where you must bounce across the backs of floating alien tortoises to hit crates, and the two schnurgle-riding segments are broken up by another Ika-Ika gravity-manipulation assault course - and of course the Flashback Tape is, once again, very far into the level. It also has one of the highest box counts of any level in the game, in a game where levels with 200+ boxes are the rule rather than the exception - if you can't access the Blue Gem path, you'll be lucky if you can even get the Wumpa gems. On top of all this, it also has one of the hardest Bonus Rounds in the game, where you must somehow hop over a bouncing metal crate while sliding all over pink goo, while simultaneously avoiding the Nitro just on the other side - the Ika-Ika segments of the round are almost a piece of cake in comparison, which is saying a lot.
- Rush Hour, from the 9th dimension (the Sn@xx Dimension) is the longest level in the game and a nightmare to get a perfect relic on as a result. For Dingodile you've got a section with jumping on moving vehicles(the smaller ones will fall down if you stand on them too long) and avoiding nitros, some of which are carried by flying drones, the four boxes at the end are damn near impossible to suck up without taking at least one hit because of the sheer amount of drones and nitros in the way. Then Tawna's section has several rail grinding sections where you have open electric gates and jump over moving cable cars not to mention two insanely fast and stress-inducing sections where you have to cross over moving vehicles, only this time you also have to deal with oncoming traffic in some lanes that can hit you(and even if you have a mask they can still push you off the edge to your doom if you aren't careful) and the cars all move in varied directions and speeds that make it incredibly easy to fall to your doom. The N. Verted version of this level is even longer because of the slow water physics, and said physics make it easy to miss boxes on the rails as the filter makes it tough to judge how close you are to the boxes(and also makes the grapple-hook prompts difficult to see).
- Toxic Tunnels, from the 10th and final world, Cortex Island 1996. It is almost incomprehensibly long and jam-packed with boxes, most of which are hidden away inside the secret path which requires all four Coloured Gems to access - if you can't access it, the chances of getting even the first Wumpa gem is next to nil. It also pushes your grasp of Crash/Coco's basic platforming skills to the limits, with numerous slippery wall-riding sections and swinging platforms that will incinerate you if you're not fast enough to get off, dotted with possibly the worst enemy in the game - electric bugs that take up entire platforms with their attacks, and at a few points will purposely change their timing just to herd you into shocking range.
- Cortex Castle, the final level of the game, is an exam of how well you can handle the Quantum Masks - you must use all four masks throughout the level, culminating in a finale where you must switch between each of them in rapid succession to get past a death gauntlet of lasers, moving platforms, and huge chasms which must be bounced across on TNT or Nitro crates - towards the end, the masks are practically side-by-side. Even the music for this part sounds designed to put you on edge - and it turns on right at the part where the Flashback Tape shows up! Yes, every level in the final dimension practically puts the Flashback Tape right at the end, so you can't make any mistakes - if you do, have fun restarting from the beginning and listening to Cortex bickering with his past self for the 10th time.
