Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (2020)

I am uninstalling the game and calling it quits at 102/106% for the sake of my own sanity before I try to get all of the platinum relics. I'm lowering my score a star out of pure spite. My judgement is going to be taking the completionist experience into consideration because ignoring that experience will feel like ignoring how the game is designed. If we are just talking about seeing the credits, this probably would have been my favorite crash game, so it's a shame I didn't enjoy the experience as a whole.

• You have most of your abilities from the beginning so movement feels nice.
• The accessibility options are nice. I like the enhanced shadows, subtitles, and the addition of modern mode.
• A large variety of unlockable skins.
• There's a lot of variety in the level themes and aesthetics.
• The new masks add some variety, but they're locked to specific level sections so they don't feel as substantial as the power-ups in crash 3. The Cortex, Tawna, and Dingodile levels are a nice addition for variety too.
• The camera is straight garbo. It's fine for 90% of the game, but there's certain sections where it doesn't transition fast enough and it makes the next section harder.
• This game reminds me a bit of Mighty No 9 in that they're both inspired by retro games, but somehow adds way more tedium than their inspiration. The increased volume and focus on getting collectables and making getting the collectables way harder to get really soured me on the game starting as early as level 3. Getting the perfect runs is pretty miserable because of how hard it is to find all of the boxes in a level. They require a level of familiarity with a level that goes beyond playing a level a lot. Collecting wumpa fruit feels like way more of a chore since they're tied to gems instead of being nice things to get for 1-ups. The levels are incredibly long, so making a single mistake and having to restart the level from the beginning is soul-crushing. It doesn't help that it feels like you are waiting around a lot if you have to retry often. The levels load slow because they start with an animation that doesn't really add to the experience and you have to watch the death animations. All of these small things add up to significant amounts of time. There are so many "point-of-no-return" sections in every level, it's kind of ridiculous. They make the game even more tedious to complete since you can't backtrack in case you missed something. You get one opportunity and if you miss it, then you have to reset. A lot of grinding sections, character switching moments, and single-use boxes are littered throughout the game and they feel more like obstacles than things included for the sake of being fun.
• The repetition is pretty insane. There's a few levels that essentially remix half of a level you've already played before. So if you play the levels normally + play the inverted versions, it feels like playing the same level 4 times at a minimum.
• The mechanics are pretty frustrating. I'm not a fan of how Crash/Coco move in mid-air when they're above ice. I can handle sliding on ice, but why lose control when jumping from a neutral position just because you're over ice? Aku-aku feels pretty unimportant. He barely shows up in the story and this is the most insignificant he's felt in terms of gameplay. There are so many ways to die instantly, so a lot of the time it doesn't matter whether you have him or not. In the old games, he was a safety net, but in this one, he's just there. The fact that he doesn't persist between levels doesn't help this either. The targeting system is so bad. Why target the enemy that's in my face when I can just launch something into a pile of boxes instead? And sometimes, launching an enemy into a box on accident can actively hinder your progress too.

I'm kinda shocked how good this game is. I knew it was well-liked but still. It looks phenomenal (even the Switch version), has tight controls and overall delivers very high-quality platformer gameplay.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the difficulty. For such a child-friendly presentation, it sure doesn't pull any punches. I'm up for it though. Nice to have short challenging levels with great controls.

Fuck you, Activision. First, you fold Vicarious Visions into Blizzard, now Toys for Bob into Call of Duty. Just when Toys for Bob proved that they could make their own games faithful to the source material, they are now relegated to supporting the development for Call of Duty. This absolutely stings as someone who got into Spyro and Crash recently. Fuck you, Activision. Fuck you to hell.

Nicholas Kole was the illustrator and concept artist

Right when the Switch version comes out and I'm playing it, the PC version is just announced to have an earlier release date than expected (March 26th). .-.

THEN WHY DIDN'T THEY ANNOUNCE THE RELEASE DATE ALONGSIDE INSTEAD OF NOW? THEY ANNOUNCED THAT IT WOULD BE COMING OUT "LATER THIS YEAR", SO YOU SHOULD EXPECT THAT IT WOULD COME OUT SAY MONTHS LATER. I WOULD'VE GOTTEN THE PC VERSION.