Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy

I've seen a lot of people complain about these versions, but as someone who didn't grow up with the original games on PS1, I didn't have any qualms with the remakes' changes. I had fun with this, but I'm a bitch and sometimes the difficulty was too hot to handle. But I got through, and had fun overall. The Switch version, while perfectly playable, doesn't look too hot. With portable mode especially looking really rough. But hey, it ran without issue so what can I really complain about.

Great graphic overhaul aside, Crash Bandicoot is still the same mediocre platformer it used to be 20 years ago. It's fun for a while, but it never motivated me to find all gems or even do the team trials. Levels are brief and straightforward, require memorization instead of exploration, and don't tolerate even the slightest mistake to be completed.

Crash 1: hands down the hardest of the three, even after the addition of extra checkpoints when you keep dying at the same spot. Levels are smaller, less varied, but usually intense. Despite requiring cold blood and ultra-precise jumping, the controls are kind of stiff and unreliable, especially with jumps and enemy hitboxes.

Crash 2: much easier than the first if you are just looking for the crystals, but finding all gems might take hard work (not even trying). The only significant difference is the introduction of sliding, body slams, and a few fun vehicles to ride (except that damn jetpack). The plot proves that Crash is a complete idiot, and those huge heads doing monologues every now and then are kind of annoying.

Crash 3: even easier but definitely more varied than the second. The only levels that took some practice are the motorbike races and pretty much all other areas requiring continuous movement. 100% completion seems hard but feasible after getting the gun and the extra abilities.

Crash Bandicoot:

- game isn't challenging for any genuine reason but mostly because the camera is shit and you can't tell what the hell is going on. you're left staring at the shadow of your character rather than your actual character because the camera angle is positioned in such a way that you cant see where the fuck your feet are actually going to go.

- everytime i thought about playing this game it was dread. its a total slog and exercise in frustration and trial & error. you will never beat a stage on the first life. you need to slowly inch your way forwards one step at a time, die, repeat, game over, repeat. memorize. repeat. it sucks. its not fun. its not challenging. its just tedious. boring. moment to moment gameplay sucks. 1 step forward 2 steps back.

- 1 hit deaths are kind of not enjoyable in pretty much all games. especially when the camera is so ambiguous and shitty where you can barely tell where the fuck the character is.

- getting to the end of a level with 0 lives left and game overing because the controls are ambiguous and trash is REALLY god damn frustrating. oh when you bounce on a box you dont just hold A, you have to specifically wait until just the right combination of awkward janky phyiscs interactions THEN hold a to go 'slighltly higher' so you can 'just barely' make the jump. the physics suck. the jumping is annoying. i'm pretty sure the original game is better than this.

- boss fights with stupid gimmicks that you cant figure out on the first few attemps need to just die over and over until you figure out the stupid gimmick. not fun.


+ the levels are pretty cool and varied but due to issues earlier they aren't really enjoyable.

+ graphics are fine and colorful and enjoyable, its a simplsitic and minimal game. easy to pickup hard to master. but as i've said its only hard to master because its mostly trial and error. i genuinely dont think anyone can just pickup this game and play through it without dying dozens of times first on every level. because of this, the thought of even playing it feels like a chore

not really the classic I was hoping for sadly. apparently the first one is the most unforgiving so maybe the other ones will be a bit painless
6/10











Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back

N/A


Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped

N/A

The Crash games didn't really need remakes since the games on their own have aged fairly well (aside from maybe the original), but here we got a remaster that everyone was pumped for when it was announced at E3 the year before it released and then it came out and everyone instantly started praising this while reviewers and people who never played the Crash games before were calling this the second coming of Dark Souls and acting like the games difficulty was too much. I grew up with the original Crash trilogy, in fact my first PS1 game was the first Crash Bandicoot that my dad gave me for a birthday present along with the PS1 console back in the 90s. I remember getting the other 2 Crash games as Christmas presents around the time they first came out along with CTR and Crash Bash. I wasn't really hyped for this as I already owned the original Crash games on PSN and found them fine enough but thought it could be a nice idea to bring new people to these games that never experienced them, plus based on the previews the graphics looked really nice.

Well I finally got around to playing these and well it has its highlights but also some notable flaws that weren't in the originals. The big improvements are the huge visual upgrade, which makes the levels more colorful and textures more detailed (although I will admit I do prefer the design of some of the original levels better), the games give you checkpoints at the bonus stages (which makes the first Crash game easier), and of course added time trials for the first 2 games and the first Crash no longer needing no death runs of the level to get the gem. As far as improvements go thought that's as far as this trilogy goes. It has some pretty big downgrades, the main one being voice acting and boss introductions. They couldn't get any of the original voice actors back, although some of the voice actors in this have voiced the characters in the newer Crash games, but no voice actors return from the original trilogy which is a shame since Cortex and Uka Uka had such good voices in the original games. Some do an alright job trying to imitate, but most you can tell are knockoffs of the originals, and only Coco and Aku Aku actually sound remotely decent.

Like I was saying before, I could have forgave the voice acting since most of the game you don't even have the characters talking, and the story of Crash was never its strong point, but the intro cutscenes to many bosses were altered or changed, with dialog sometimes even omitted like Dingodile when he says "You Thrashed Me Mate" which was such a memorable quote I still knew it from when I played the game as a kid, and the N Sane just makes odd random changes like that. The other thing is the physics are slightly different, it wasn't really bad or too noticeable in the first game but in 2 I found myself dying way more then the original and the hitboxes are different along with the weight of Crash and his jump arch. I know this is sort of the developers attempting to modernize Crash, but the original games had such solid controls and in this I felt like Crash had a giant weight attached to his foot, I just died over and over because of these controls on levels in the original games I could beat in 1 or 2 tries. I think for me the controls of these newer games are what make them not as enjoyable for me, it adds frustration to games I loved and never found to be too difficult. Mainly the 2nd game suffers from this, the 3rd felt fine although that might be because the 3rd was less focused on precise platforming like 2, but the 3rd game did have some pretty bad vehicle controls especially the revamped jet levels which felt worse than the original.

A few final things to note are the soundtracks are revamped but sound pretty close to the originals, I have a slight preference over the original songs but they did a good job that I hardly noticed, which I can't say the same for other game remasters that altered the soundtracks. Also the 1st game is probably the game that benefits the most from this remaster with slightly more polished controls than the original and being able to get gems still if you die in a level, plus they added Stormy Ascent which is a cut level from the original game and arguably the hardest level in all Crash, which is cool they gave that to us. So overally this really is a mixed bag, some good and some bad but definitely doesn't hit the high mark of the originals and the only game that maybe was improved was the original Crash and even with those changes I still have a slight preference for the original Crash (Maybe due to nostalgia and being my first PS1 game but still). It just feels like Crash was reskinned, given new voices, and new physics and mechanics, and everyone is praising this as some sort of masterpiece that improves so much on the originals. The originals are all still games that are fun, control fairly well, have solid enough graphics and aren't overly difficult, and this just doesn't fix or add anything really so I guess the only good thing about this trilogy is the shiny look and bringing the series new fans who weren't able to experience the original Crash games back in the 90s.

Remaking older games in their image of the day can be a tricky proposition, because as with many remakes, you have to start asking yourself how much you're willing to change to make it "better" at the risk of compromising the original vision. The N. Sane Trilogy most messes with the outlandishly dated first game, fixing the borked save system which I think we can all be happy about. They also attempted to introduce more control parity, but maybe not enough. Once you get to Warped's slide-high jump-tornado, it's very hard to go back.

Still, I think they did the best they could, presenting a prettier version of the three old titles with many, if not all, of the classic moments and Easter eggs brought forward and parity in progression with the older titles receiving time trials. Crash 1 is still fairly frustrating by today's standards even after all's said and done, but the other two are must plays.