VideoGame A Whumping great time
Yeah, bet you've never heard that header before.
This game sets out to do something incredibly risky: to live up to the quality of the original trilogy. Now, I've never played the original PS 1 classics, but I do have the amazing N.Sane Trilogy, and so I have something to compare it to. So does it stack up to the originals?
Well, I mean, you did see the title, didn't you?
Ok, seriously though, this genuinely is worthy of having crash's name on it. Hell, in some aspects, it even surpasses the original trilogy.
One of those improvements is the general plot. OK, it's generally not hard to beat an Excuse Plot, but still, this might have the best plot of any crash game out there. All the characters get changes in their personalities that actually work this time around: Cortex goes from a lovable dope to a man utterly broken by his repeated defeats, N.Brio becomes incredibly affable, N.Trophy becomes much more evil, ECT. There are some characters that go unchanged (Crash is still, well, Crash, N.Gin is still the loyal assistant, Aku Aku doesn't play much of a role), but their characters generally worked without being complex, so whatever.
I will say that there are some missed opportunities with the plot, such as there being a whopping two dimensional counterparts and a lack of callbacks to the later Crash games, but admittedly, dimension traveling plots have a huge potential for missed opportunity, and the game does still do a good amount of ideas with it, so I'll let it slide.
Now, the gameplay. First, I might wanna get this out of the way: this game's control's a lot more slippery than the original trilogy. For anyone who played the other games, getting used to these controls might take a while. When you do, however, you'll find a faithful take on the original's gameplay, basically taking the hallway styled levels and making them a bit more open, which does a surprising amount of good to the gameplay. The new Quantum Masks are fun as well, never clashing with the game too hard and adding a lot to it as well. Seriously, the Time Stop alone would make for a fun game.
Then we get to the elephant in the room: This. Game. Is. Hard. Harder than the originals, even. The game's gonna kick your ass at at least one point. Thankfully, the games hardest content is completely optional, and it only awards you with some (Well made, to be fair) costumes.
So yeah, that's Crash 4. Not much else to say, really, it's a great time overall.
VideoGame Worthy successor to the original trilogy
Crash 4 is the first new game in the franchise in over 10 years. It's also the best game in the franchise since Warped. From the first level, it's apparent how much care went into the game. From the beautiful backgrounds, to Crash's cute new design, and even to the new elements added to make this game stand out: the Quantum Masks. They really do wonders for the gameplay. I recently completed the main game, which was fun! I really enjoyed playing as Tawna and Dingodile! At the moment I'm trying to 100% the game, which is... hard. WAY harder than the original trilogy. But there's nothing wrong with that! To me, my philosophy on that is the harder the game, the more rewarding it is when you complete it. Looking forward to whatever Toys for Bob does with the franchise next!
VideoGame 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.
VideoGame 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.