E3 2017: ‘Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy’ Looks Beautiful, But Feels Off
Last year people were jumping for joy when Sony announced that they’d be remastering the first 3 Crash Bandicoot games for an HD trilogy collection back at E3 2016.
Flash forward a year to E3 2017 and there are only 2 weeks left until the game game CRASHES (pun very intended) onto store shelves. People have also gotten the chance to play numerous demos which have left a lot of people. . . . . . mixed. I myself recently got the chance to sit down and try the game, and what did I think? Ehhhhhh.
My play time was spent on Crash 3: Wrapped since it’s my favorite out of the trilogy. I played Orient Express and Midnight Run, The Coco tiger levels where you play on the great wall of china. The first thing I have to say is that I absolutely love the graphics. Everything is colorful, vibrant, and has some sort of energy to it. Even Coco herself is more expressive as she has more facial animations, and even victory poses just like Crash.
So both the music and graphics are ace, but sadly the most disappointing part of N. Sane is the fact that the gameplay feels. . . . . off. I’ll be the first to admit that while I love Crash 2 & 3, the first one is a tad dated and doesn’t feel nearly as good to play as 2 and 3. With this trilogy, it feels a bit like they took the physics from the first game and just transferred them to the other titles without realizing that they had a much faster and different physics than the original. As a result, the levels end up feeling slower and the characters end up feeling a bit heavier than what they originally were.
The controls also feel slightly delayed. Many times when I tried to move out of the way of an oncoming barrel it felt like Coco was moving a second or 2 after I actually moved her. Same thing happened when I tried jumping over dragon or a piece of broken road. This threw me off a good number of times, and even caused me a game over with at least 6 lives. Obviously I don’t want to say the devs didn’t care about what they were making because I’ve seen many interviews and can tell that they’re very passionate about this project, and that they want Crash to have a future.
The ability to play as Coco fully in the previous 2 games (bosses excluded) is a really cool addition and shows how much they care about making this a great package, but at the same time, it’s very important for those games to still feel like those games. Perhaps they’re still working on the game right up to its release and are still trying to nail down the physics, but in the end, the game was a bit disappointing to me. That’s not to say I don’t want it to succeed though. If you’re not bothered by how the gameplay in Crash 1 feels, you should be fine and will love this collection. I still wish the best for this game and hope it sells well so we can see Crash return with a brand new game, but for me, I’ll stick to the originals.
