So, it's finally here: the "true" sequel to the original Naughty Dog trilogy, now made by Toys For Bob of all things (rather than something like Vicarious Visions or Beenox). Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to like the game, there's several things I personally think hold it back from feeling like a truly great ND successor:
First off, the physics feel... weird. Crash has this thing where he doesn't accelerate on a dime like he should; he starts off slow before suddenly speeding up a half-second later. He feels weirdly floaty in the air, to the point where he can easily overshoot or undershoot platforms in ways he wouldn't in the original trilogy. The slide jump is also completely ruined: it no longer carries you as far and completely ruins your momentum, making it near-useless.
The level design is also a culprit here: it just doesn't feel as fluid or well designed as ND's efforts (or even that one level VV did for the NST). A lot of the time you're constantly forced to make pixel-perfect jumps on tiny platforms, and often you're forced to deal with enemies and obstacles firing on you every second with not much in terms of a difficulty curve like the other games. It starts off frustrating and gets even more frustrating the later you go on in a way the original trilogy didn't. And then there's the hidden crates: every level has at least one crate that's hidden just off-screen in a completely unintuitive location with no indication; I know the original trilogy had some levels with those types of crates too, but they were the minority, and said levels were usually pretty short so it was easy to play through them again. IAT's levels just drag on for practically forever - I feel like some of them could easily have been split into multiple smaller stages and been more fun to play overall.
The presentation's hit-or-miss; I can give praise to TFB for their beautiful environment design, and the music's full of neat remixes of old music and decent original music, but the character designs and animation leave something to be desired: I think most of them have questionable changes and look worse than their ND/NST versions (Coco, Cortex, Tawna and Fake Crash are the worst examples: Coco has a weird squashed head and noodle limbs, Cortex looks too tall and lacks his underbite, Tawna's a completely different character and Fake Crash's goofy large teeth and huge eyebrows are heavily downplayed). The animations are also oddly stiff in-game; Crash's run and most of Tawna's animations are particularly janky. This is probably a nitpick, but the voice acting has some baffling changes which I don't like: Crash, Coco and Tawna aren't voiced by their recent actors from the NST or NF, but others imitating said actors. Why replace them when the original actors sounded perfectly fine as is?
As much as I hate to say it, I don't think it lives up to the original trilogy.
Sadly doesn't live up to the original trilogy.
So, it's finally here: the "true" sequel to the original Naughty Dog trilogy, now made by Toys For Bob of all things (rather than something like Vicarious Visions or Beenox). Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to like the game, there's several things I personally think hold it back from feeling like a truly great ND successor:
First off, the physics feel... weird. Crash has this thing where he doesn't accelerate on a dime like he should; he starts off slow before suddenly speeding up a half-second later. He feels weirdly floaty in the air, to the point where he can easily overshoot or undershoot platforms in ways he wouldn't in the original trilogy. The slide jump is also completely ruined: it no longer carries you as far and completely ruins your momentum, making it near-useless.
The level design is also a culprit here: it just doesn't feel as fluid or well designed as ND's efforts (or even that one level VV did for the NST). A lot of the time you're constantly forced to make pixel-perfect jumps on tiny platforms, and often you're forced to deal with enemies and obstacles firing on you every second with not much in terms of a difficulty curve like the other games. It starts off frustrating and gets even more frustrating the later you go on in a way the original trilogy didn't. And then there's the hidden crates: every level has at least one crate that's hidden just off-screen in a completely unintuitive location with no indication; I know the original trilogy had some levels with those types of crates too, but they were the minority, and said levels were usually pretty short so it was easy to play through them again. IAT's levels just drag on for practically forever - I feel like some of them could easily have been split into multiple smaller stages and been more fun to play overall.
The presentation's hit-or-miss; I can give praise to TFB for their beautiful environment design, and the music's full of neat remixes of old music and decent original music, but the character designs and animation leave something to be desired: I think most of them have questionable changes and look worse than their ND/NST versions (Coco, Cortex, Tawna and Fake Crash are the worst examples: Coco has a weird squashed head and noodle limbs, Cortex looks too tall and lacks his underbite, Tawna's a completely different character and Fake Crash's goofy large teeth and huge eyebrows are heavily downplayed). The animations are also oddly stiff in-game; Crash's run and most of Tawna's animations are particularly janky. This is probably a nitpick, but the voice acting has some baffling changes which I don't like: Crash, Coco and Tawna aren't voiced by their recent actors from the NST or NF, but others imitating said actors. Why replace them when the original actors sounded perfectly fine as is?
As much as I hate to say it, I don't think it lives up to the original trilogy.