My 8-year-old daughter was watching me play Crash 4 the other day and she kept pestering me to play the game. I tried to warn her "I know it looks fun, but this game is gonna kick your ass, kid.” She was head over heels for the goofy Saturday morning cartoon-style cutscenes and entranced by the vibrant and colorful art direction, but she had no idea what she was getting herself into. She adores Mario and Spyro, and she thought Crash 4 looked just as magical as those games. After watching her struggle to finish even a single level of Crash 4, and perishing over and over in vain, she gave up. I gave her some words of encouragement, and she ran off to play with her sister. I had to chuckle to myself a bit. Poor kid. That is truly Crash 4 in a nutshell. Bright, charming, adorable, vibrant....and deceptively sadistic in its challenge. Hell, her old man has died 30-40 times on some of the Crash 4’s more maddening levels (but don't tell her that)! After more than 20 years, the true sequel to the legendary PlayStation platforming trilogy has arrived, and for better or worse, it's more insane than ever.
Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (PS4 [reviewed], Xbox One)
Developer: Toys for Bob
Publisher: Activision
Released: October 2, 2020
MSRP: $59.99
I was really pleased to see Toys for Bob incorporate a modern difficulty setting. You can still play with a traditional set of lives like the classic PlayStation games if you desire, but the new modern option allows the player infinite lives. When our lovable marsupial meets his end, you can simply return to your most recent checkpoint as many times as needed without fear of a game over screen. Your HUD keeps track of how many times you perish and tallies it up near the right corner of the screen. It's a humorous and effective way to evolve the difficulty of the franchise. The game knows it's brutal and it's having fun with that concept. Crash gameplay has always been trial and error to some degree. Levels require memorization and quick reflexes that oftentimes felt frustrating in earlier entries in the series. Forcing the player to replay entire levels over and over and over again. The same is true here but the new modern difficulty feels like the right evolution for the series and works well for what is easily the toughest Crash game yet.
However, despite knocking the new modern difficulty setting out of the park, other aspects of the game’s difficulty feel problematic. There were more than a few sections in the game where I ran into a portion of a level that felt sadistic instead of clever or challenging.
Speaking of sadistic we need to talk about the collectibles here. Crash Bandicoot isn't exactly a collect-a-thon style 3D platformer but collectibles are vital to the experience for me. Unfortunately, the collectible part of the game goes a bit overboard. You have twelve gems you can collect per level. You collect six for completing certain requirements in a level normally and then six for completing requirements in the new N.verted mode. It's not just the layout of the levels that can change while playing the N.verted mode, but also the physics, visuals, and everything else. The level might be almost invisible, and you need to splatter paint everywhere to find your way through it, or the gameplay speed might be altered. Some of these ideas are clever and unique, but others fall flat.
Generally speaking, you collect gems for smashing all of the boxes and collecting Wumpa fruit in a level. There’s also one hidden gem per level and one awarded for dying three times or less. You also have three time trial relics you can acquire for speeding through a level. Sound like a lot? There's more. The final and most ruthlessly challenging collectible is the N.Sanely Perfect Relic N.Sanely Perfect Relic. This one tasks you with getting all Clear Gems without dying in one perfect run, and quite frankly it feels nearly impossible. With as brutal as this game is the pursuit of perfection feels maddening.
I really enjoyed the new flashback tape bonus levels...at first. If you can reach the flashback tape collectible floating around in each level without dying you unlock special bonus stages. These special challenge levels are a ton of fun and a clever way to fill in some of the backstories of our Bandicoot’s origin while also providing a fun change of pace. However, the difficulty tuning rears it's ugly head again here because you can't unlock these unless you can reach the tape in each level without dying. Eventually, I lost interest. Toys for Bob has tweaked the difficulty knob just a bit too far into the sadistic with Crash 4. I found that my personal quest to nab all the collectibles, something I love achieving in platformers, left me feeling irritated and hopeless until eventually I just gave up altogether. The level design and general platforming feel works well enough until it starts demanding perfection, something that just feels a bit at odds with its death counter and new modern difficulty. The general design of the game exacerbates many of the insane collectible requirements.
Those brutal platinum time trials relics? Yeah, you have to finish those levels in one perfect run AND beat the best time or it's back to the beginning. Not great news for what feels like the toughest Crash game yet.
One of the biggest diversions from the classic Crash Bandicoot formula is the edition of new playable side characters. You can now play certain levels in the game with characters plucked from the pages of Bandicoot lore such as Neo Cortex, Dingodile, and a revamped version of Crash's original love interest: Tawna. These levels are not simply rehashed versions of the levels Crash and his sister Coco can play through. They are fleshed out and designed around each of the character’s unique skill sets. Tawna, for example, gets a strangely magnetic feeling double jump, a grappling hook, and some nice karate-kicking attacks. Neo Cortex has a surprisingly complex hook with his blaster pistol that can turn enemies into a solid form or a bouncy gelatinous-like form for tricky platforming hijinx and level navigation. I applaud Toys for Bob for taking a chance on switching up the traditional formula, but ultimately the side character missions felt superfluous to me. Crash Bandicoot platforming has been finely honed in over decades, so it feels strange to suddenly play as Dingodile for a few levels where you use a vacuum to float around and launch boxes at your enemies like a rocket launcher. It's not poorly executed, but it's also not executed well enough to stand with or above the traditional Crash and Coco levels. Eventually, I found myself avoiding any level that was not a traditional level, which is never a good sign.
The art direction is gorgeous, and it's far and away the highlight of the experience. Much like the Spyro reignited trilogy Crash 4 is bursting at the seams with colorful charm. This new vibrant art style is the way I dreamed Crash Bandicoot would look when I was a kid! Environments at times are so beautiful to behold it can be distracting! Toys for Bob have really proven they have an unparalleled artistic touch when it comes to bringing classic platforming games to life visually. Crash 4 is aesthetically superb.
Verdict: Toys for Bob deserve a ton of credit for doing the original crash trilogy justice with crash 4. You can tell this game was molded from the minds of developers that truly love the jort wearing marsupial mascot. The art direction is stunning, and the gameplay feels like a subtle but modernized evolution of the franchise’s core gameplay. Crash 4 as a complete package is just too messy and sadistically frustrating for me to really sing it's praises, but the art direction alone is almost worth the price of admission.
Buy it.
Author: Morgan Barnes
[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer]