The List of Limbo #2: Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time – It’s enough to drive you N. Sane

Yes, it’s another one of these. And contrasting with my last entry (but coincidentally enough, within the same genre), this time, we’re discussing a modern game: Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, the newest Crash Bandicoot game, released in 2020 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and in 2021 for the Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X. There was also a PC version, but apparently it was tied to some Blizzard online thing or something, so I’m not really sure where you get that, and anyway, if a PC game isn’t available on Steam or as a DRM-free copy, it’s dead to me. Crash Bandicoot was one of those series that I played and enjoyed growing up, and it went for quite a long time without a new entry that wasn’t a spin-off or genre change; the last main-series platformer was Crash Twinsanity, released in 2004, and the last one that played like the PS1 originals was Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex in 2001. Incidentally, it’s pretty silly that they called this game “Crash Bandicoot 4”, because Crash 4 already existed and was called The Wrath of Cortex. The Japanese version even had the number explicitly in the title (and I still don’t know why the English-speaking world is so averse to numbered sequels sometimes). Now that this game exists, you have to refer to it by the full title when out of context because just “Crash Bandicoot 4” is ambiguous. That aside, though, you may be thinking, as the first Crash Bandicoot game in 17 or possibly even 20 years that returns to the series’ roots, how does this hold up? Is it a good game? Well…I’m afraid that the framing pretty much spoils the answer to that. If I liked the game, I’d be doing a regular review of it. So you may commence with the wailing, gnashing of teeth, mourning, and wearing all black clothing (unless you’re a goth who already dresses in black, in which case you might consider expressing your sorrows by wearing bright pink sparkly clothing instead).

This game follows the ending of Crash 3. Cortex escapes his predicament with the help of N. Tropy, and they proceed to wreak merry havoc causing holes to open in the space-time continuum, so Crash and his friends must stop them. In addition to Crash, Coco, and Aku Aku, this game also introduces four new masks, each with their own powers and personalities (I know what you’re thinking, and no, none of them protect the bandicoots from viruses, nor do they have to stay 6 feet apart) and each available for certain parts of some levels. Also, while Crash and Coco are the regular playable characters (Coco playing exactly the same as Crash), there are a few levels where you get to play as other characters for a bit. So far, I’ve seen an alternate-universe version of Tawna who is much stronger and more adventurous than her Crash 1 counterpart, and Dingodile, who seems to have just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time (no pun intended), and I’ve heard that it’s also possible to play as Cortex later on.

The game looks and sounds good enough. Being on modern consoles, it certainly has a much higher polygon count than the PS1 or even PS2 Crash games. I’ll admit that I don’t remember much of the music; the only track that stuck with me was the theme for the first boss, where you fight N. Gin as he’s playing the drums in a rock band (yes, really). But it’s possible that I’d be able to appreciate the soundtrack more if I listened to it by itself. Where this game really screws the pooch is in the gameplay, mainly because of how hard it is. Basically, this is Crash Bandicoot on Lunatic Mode. What would be endgame difficulty in Crash 2, 3, the other 4, or even 1 is reached and passed a third of the way through this game, and it only gets tougher from there. Where it gets really bad is when you’re trying to go for all of the gems and other items. Bonus rooms in this game are ridiculously hard compared to anything in the other games (the closest thing would be Crash 1’s Brio and Cortex bonus rounds, but even those weren’t this nasty), and quite often, boxes are hidden in very obscure and often unfair locations. I played the first half of the game, about 20 levels, and got the box gems on maybe three of them. And it wasn’t due to there being a lot of colored gem routes, either; there are only four colored gems in this game, as opposed to the five of Crash 2-4A or the six of Crash 1, and they don’t seem to be used a whole lot. It also takes a lot more time to replay levels if you missed anything (or, heaven forbid, failed a time trial) because they are much, much longer than anything in the old games. I don’t mind long levels in a vacuum, but long and ridiculously hard is a bad combination (see also: Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams), even more so when you’re trying to look for items. The final straw for me as far as getting the boxes goes was Run It Bayou, the last level in the fifth area and the last level that I beat before shelving the game. After trying nine times just to get the boxes before the first checkpoint and not even coming close, I decided that I just wasn’t having fun and pretty much rushed through the rest of the level to see if that would make it any better. I also somehow managed to glitch through the bottom of the same section when trying to jump on the jet-ski, had the camera freak out, got stuck, and had to restart the level, so that was nice.

Then there are the alternate characters. Their differing movesets are actually pretty neat, and they would have been a great idea in a better game. Tawna has a grappling hook and a wall-jump, and Dingodile has basically a big vacuum that he can use to suck things up and launch them back out. But you don’t actually get to play as them for an entire level, just the first half or so of one, and then you finish it by switching back to Crash/Coco in a level that you’ve already beaten with them, except that now it has more obstacles. If you give me alternate playable characters with their own levels, let me actually play as them for the whole level, not just part of it. Also, I don’t know if it’s a problem with the game as a whole or if the Switch version has issues, but I swear the controls don’t always respond how they should (and no, I wasn’t even using the Joy-Cons); quite often, I’d try to move and Crash wouldn’t go quite the right direction even when I was using the D-pad. The Tawna levels were particularly frustrating in this way; her grappling hook is a bit finicky, and I swear her wall-jump just plain doesn’t work about 40% of the time. Considering that you have to use both of those moves above bottomless pits and other hazards, that is a problem. The rail-grinding sections were also pretty annoying, especially when going for boxes, because of how little reaction time they gave you. It all ties back to the high difficulty level, and in general, I feel like there was a lot in this game that just didn’t feel like it left enough room for error. You know, some of the levels in the older games could be difficult, and some of them could be quite a challenge to complete, but this game is on a whole different level. The High Road in Crash 1 was hard, but it wasn’t as hard as this game. Bee-Having in Crash 2 was annoying, but it wasn’t as annoying as making single-block-wide jumps at a 30-degree angle to get boxes. The motorcycle and flight levels in Crash 3 were tiresome gimmicks, but at least they didn’t require split-second reflexes to avoid missing boxes or dying. And Gold Rush in OG Crash 4 was long, but it wasn’t four times as long as a typical Crash trilogy level while also being difficult.

Summary:

Problems: The difficulty, the difficulty, the freaking difficulty. This game is tough enough when you’re just trying to get to the end, but if you’re actually going for completion? “Ridiculous” isn’t a strong enough word for it. No matter how hard you thought some parts of the other Crash Bandicoot games were, I guarantee you that nothing in those comes close to the kind of hell this game will put you through for 100%, let alone 106%. My lesser complaints mostly all tie into this.

Things that were okay: The presentation of the game was good. I thought the graphics and environments looked very nice, the characterization and story were fair enough for a Crash game (aside from the N. Tropies’ end goals and what happened to the alternate-universe Crash and Coco, which if you ask me is too dark for this series), and the idea of visiting all the different places and time periods was neat (even if Crash 3 kind of already did that), as were the ideas for the levels. The Quantum Masks were pretty cool as well.

Odds of returning to it: High

If I had a nickel for every video game I got in 2021 that was on the Switch, was a new entry in a series that I’d previously enjoyed, and should have been great but, due to poor design choices, ultimately ended up being more irritating than fun, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right? I’m giving this one a high rating because I do think that I might come back to it someday, but oof, this is the first Crash Bandicoot platformer that I’ve seriously considered not finishing. It’s not just a lack of skill…when I got 100% completion on the first four games (okay, the N. Sane Trilogy version of the first one), didn’t think that Stormy Ascent was that bad, have beaten every classic Mega Man game, and have gotten full completion on every Donkey Kong Country game including the super-tough secret levels, and yet I can only make it halfway through this game before feeling like it’s too frustrating to bother with, Toys for Bob done goofed. And you know what the absolute most painful thing about it is? There isn’t even a good alternative. There are vanishingly few games that play similarly to Crash Bandicoot; 3D platformers are already rather rare compared to many genres, and most of the ones that are out there are open-area and are collectathon junk that shouldn’t even qualify as a platformer, or at the very least consist of repeating the same levels like…well, like my previous List of Limbo entry. There’s Super Mario 3D Land and World, which I’ve long since finished, and there’s Donald Duck: Goin’ Quackers, and there is little if anything else worth playing. I really hope that they make more Crash Bandicoot games that are better (or at least easier and more fair) than Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, but considering that game developers have a marked tendency to get all the wrong messages when a game doesn’t do well or is disliked, I have an uneasy suspicion that it could be another 17 years before we get anything else that’s decent in the series. It’s just a huge disappointment all around.

The List of Limbo #1: Super Mario 64 – The standard for 3D platformers (unfortunately)

Here is something a bit new. While my rating scale for normal reviews has all possible permutations for level of quality by my personal opinion, I will admit that most of my reviews will probably be for things that I at least somewhat liked (or if I didn’t like them, if they at least went by quickly enough that I could put up with them). More importantly, I only ever review things that I’ve actually finished; I feel that if I don’t get all the way through something, I can’t really give a fair assessment of it. Now, what does that have to do with this “List of Limbo”? Quite simply, the List of Limbo is basically reviews for things that I might never do a real review of because I may never actually finish them for whatever reason, because of personal bias or preference against the genre, not enjoying it enough to want to continue, running into a roadblock, or whatever else. I even have a separate rating scale for the List of Limbo, as seen on the info page below the regular rating system, for how likely I am to ever return to that item in the future and do a proper review of it.

The first work of media that I’ll be looking at for this is Super Mario 64. It may be a timeless classic in a lot of people’s minds, but if it’s on this list, I clearly don’t agree. I warned you all that when it came time for me to review things, I might be stomping on some childhood memories along the way, but you know what they say about omelets, so…let the childhood stomping begin.

Super Mario 64, if you didn’t know, is the first 3D Mario game and a launch game for the Nintendo 64. For a lot of people, it is probably the game that codified the 3D platformer genre. This time around, I guess Bowser’s trapped all the Toads in paintings or something in his perpetual quest to give a princess both PTSD and Stockholm syndrome, and we as Mario must enter the worlds depicted in those to retrieve special stars and use those stars to return things to relative normalcy. There are 15 main levels in the game, each with 7 stars to collect, and there are a few stars elsewhere as well for a total of 120 stars. Each level needs a certain number of stars to reach by way of locked doors in the castle.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, I’ve been saying for a while that 3D platformers might be the only genre easier to screw up than RPGs, and Super Mario 64 is a pretty good example of that. Given that it was one of the first 3D platformers, it stands to reason that it would have some rough spots. The camera is pretty bad, for one; it has a marked tendency to position itself at awkward angles, and despite supposedly having a manual control option (I’ve actually heard that the Nintendo 64 controller was designed for Super Mario 64, the C buttons being one reason), messing with the camera using the C buttons doesn’t seem to work very well. And speaking of the controller, the controls in this game are actually kind of annoying. I’d imagine most people have probably heard about how janky the Nintendo 64’s controller is by now, but I will at least reiterate how crappy the analog stick is, and I’m not sure why this game even needed analog control in the first place. Really, I’m not sure why analog control in general is supposed to be so great; in every game I’ve ever played that had it, I could only think how much more accurate it would have been with a separate button, rather than having a control stick that you’ll inevitably end up pushing a micrometer too far in a particular direction, causing your character to run too fast right into an obstacle. Things like “use the analog stick to tiptoe so you won’t wake up the sleeping Piranha Plant” seem just as shoehorned-in to me as the Wii’s infamous motion controls. The presence or lack of good controls can really make or break a video game, and this one definitely tends to lean more toward the “break” side. Sure, it added new moves such as the triple jump and wall jump, but I felt like the basic controls just weren’t as accurate as they should have been, especially when swimming.

Both of those pretty significant problems, however, are still less important than the thing that really ruined this game for me: the gameplay. The levels, from what I played before I gave up on the game, are small and not generally organized or paced very well, and there are only 15 of them in the entire game. One might assume that that is rectified by the star system, but the levels really don’t change much. Whichever star you’re going for, you’re still playing basically the same level, even if you’re not taking the exact same path through it. The end effect of this is that it feels like rather than playing up to 105 short stages’ worth of content, you’re just doing the same levels over and over again, and at least some of the repetition is mandatory, since you need at least 70 stars to defeat Bowser. I’m not sure who thought this was a good idea or an enjoyable way to play a game. It’s as if worlds 3 to 8 in the original Super Mario Bros. were retreads of all the levels in the first two worlds, with the only differences being that some of the levels had a few blocks, platforms, or enemies added or removed. I guess one reason for doing this could have been to save cartridge space, but considering Super Mario 64 doesn’t come anywhere near maxing out the available space inside a Nintendo 64 cartridge (the biggest games ever made for the system used 64 MB cartridges, while this game is only 8 MB), that excuse only really flies inasmuch as it was a launch game and they probably hadn’t tapped into the potential yet, similar to how Super Mario World was squeezed into a 512 KB cartridge when later SNES games such as Donkey Kong Country quite easily went up to 4 MB (in fact, the ratio is the same).

One other thing that tends to turn me off Super Mario 64, though it isn’t the game’s fault, is its fanbase. Poor game-modding communities aside, I hardly ever hear anyone who likes Super Mario 64 describe it as less than not only the best 3D Mario game but the only 3D Mario game worth playing, or even the one that all other 3D Mario games’ design should be based on. There’s always some qualifier about, for instance, Super Mario 3D Land and World not actually being 3D games (looks like somebody needs to look up what “3D” means) or being objectively inferior to Super Mario 64 (keep that dictionary around to look up what an opinion is while you’re at it), or all 3D Mario games needing to be open-world and have star collecting to be good, or some other garbage. It’s fine to like the game even if I personally don’t, but it’s not fine to tout it as the be-all, end-all approach to 3D Mario games and disparage anyone who doesn’t agree.

Summary:

Problems: The way the levels are set up makes the game extremely repetitive, the camera is questionable at best, and the controls could have used some touching up.
Things that were okay: The music is decent enough.
Odds of returning to it: Low

I really tried to like Super Mario 64, but I think I’ve given it enough chances; I wasn’t really having fun with it, and I doubt I’d ever have much incentive to give it another try. The controls are screwy, the camera is even screwier, the levels frankly feel like a whole lot of blandness and repetition…and is it just me, or is a good portion of this game’s fanbase absolutely insufferable by Mario game standards? Super Mario 64 might have been impressive in 1996, but in 2016, not so much. There are some games from that era that have aged like fine wine (Super Mario RPG, Yoshi’s Island, the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, and possibly the Mega Man games), but Super Mario 64 aged about as well as a bowl of potato salad in Death Valley. There are good 3D platformers out there, but this, as far as I’m concerned, is not one of them.