I was agreeing with you till the last line there. Okay they overloaded a bit on content, especially if going for 100% but saying they shouldn't make another is a bit unfair since this is their first attempt at it. Did a heck of a lot better then Sierra. I rather have someone competent at the wheel then someone who will change too much. And T.F.B are pretty competent at it and I'm sure they can learn from this and make exploration less of a hassle should they (I hope) get another chance. No game company is perfect after all and they were just trying to make it worth your purchase. You can't fault them for least doing that much.
I don\'t disagree that Toys for Bob are competent developers, but again, I don\'t think difficult platforming is their forte. Their attempts to make the game difficult just made it tedious and annoying. Also, gameplay aside, I don\'t like their takes on the actual characters in the game. For a game that tries to be a followup to the original trilogy, a lot of personalities are very inconsistent, changes like Dingodile turning good are given no explanation, and some of the stuff with Tawna sounds like something out of an edgy deviantart fanfic. I would, however, be 100% behind them doing a Spyro 4. Not only do I think Spyro benefits much more from their particular style of art direction and writing, but Spyro, especially when compared to Crash, has always been much too easy. If they could inject even a quarter of the challenge this game has into Spyro, they could very well make one of the best games in the series...if they get Stewart Copeland back to compose, that is.
I have to agree with character/universe depiction. They're pretty bad at character agency as well. Characters like Dingo and Brio just have allegiances because (they work as wild cards but there is meant to be character driven reasons they keep switching). Coco is also pretty much full on a one-note "better" more plot relevant version of Crash in every way, and this was right after a long string of games had deconstructed her Positive Discrimination personality and developed a cute even handed dynamic between her and Crash. It doesn't really feel like a creditable depiction of the original universe if Crash and Aku, two of the most key components of the series, feel like undercooked dead weight to the new supporting cast and gimmicks. We risk getting "Crash's shitty friends" if they do it again.
Even the Radical games with their abundant Character Derailment, seemed to do a way better job with dynamics and agency and making the cast blend together well.
The gameplay itself, yeah I kind of agree. Maybe it's because my favourites were Warped and Wrath of Cortex, so I prefer that brisker faster gameplay, but to me Crash 4 just flanderises the cycle puzzle elements of 1 to the point it's a slog. It's not even just it being difficult, it's relentlessly tedious, with few rewarding moments of freedom that even 1 had where you could just run around a smash things.
Really it feels like stuff like N Verted and all the trick crates would have been better as a separate 'hard mode' you earned after beating the normal campaign. Platinum and Perfect Relics DEFINITELY should have been kept as a mere bragging rights challenge.
Truth. The entire game feels like a downgrade from the ND trilogy in pretty much every way. I\'m hoping VV comes back; I feel like they understood the series on a fundamental level better than TFB did.
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Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About (Wasting Your Precious) Time
I loved the N. Sane Trilogy, and I loved Nitro-Fueled. I completed those games 100%, all platinum relics earned in N. Sane, all dev times beaten in Nitro-Fueled. It was difficult, maddening at times, but I pushed forward and managed to do it. I was excited for Crash 4, and I couldn't wait for a nice, new, content-packed game to beat 100%. Unfortunately, I could not push forward this time. Not because of difficulty, but because of lethargy. During the 6 or 7 hours it took me to beat the game's main story, my enthusiasm was slowly sucked away, and by the time I started going back to old levels to grab gems I didn't already earn, it suddenly dawned on me that I was having no fun at all. I didn't want to get the gems or break the crates anymore. I couldn't quite figure out why until I started comparing this game and the original trilogy, and I figured out the problem; Everything past the story feels like unnecessary padding to artificially increase the amount of playtime required to complete it.
Firstly, the levels are significantly longer with crazily high amounts of crates. On paper, this doesn't sound bad, until you remember one of the goals in any Crash level is "break all the crates". The shorter, more streamlined levels of the original trilogy kept this from getting boring, and if you missed a crate, you had less you needed to redo. Here, if you miss one crate, your entire 10 minutes in that level will have felt like a waste. And you almost certainly will miss at least one crate, because the developers have taken to hiding crates in spots that are either barely visible, off-camera, or behind pieces of the environment. So unless you use a guide, you're going to spend a lot of times combing through each level looking for crates, which is no fun.
Secondly, there are the N. Verted mode and Timeline levels. These are required for 100% completion, but this doesn't feel justified since they're just recycled versions of the game's main stages. The N. Verted mode is essentially just a mirror mode with some kind of visual gimmick in place. The gimmick differs by the stage's theme, but most of the time, it doesn't have have any actual significant gameplay change. You are playing the same stages, just mirrored and with photoshop filters over them. Then there are the timeline levels, where you play as the game's other playable characters and see how they affected Crash's journey in another level. This would be fine, but once you've reached the halfway point in these stages, you switch back to controlling Crash again, and continue to play the latter half of the Crash stage the Timeline level is connected to, the only difference being that crates and hidden gems are in different spots. Half of the level is replaying a level you already played.
This is the most disappointed I've ever been with a game. I understand that my gripes with the parts that are technically optional, but without those parts, I'm left with a game that's only a few hours long, with 80+ hours of completionist content. I loved the 100% journey in N. Sane and Nitro-Fueled, and I wanted to dig into it here, but there was no fun to be had. It was just tedious and boring. If you turn on infinite lives and just run through the stages without caring about the crates, it's a perfectly fine platformer, maybe even pretty good, but a Crash game where I'm ignoring the crates just feels so wrong. I thought Toys for Bob did a fantastic job with the Spyro remakes, but after this, I don't want them anywhere near Crash. I don't think it's their forte.