Crash Bandicoot is a great example of an experience that could not be properly captured in anything but a videogame. The focus is clearly on gameplay. Sure there is a story with a simple plots and a little bit of character development through various cut-scenes. However, there definitely isn't enough substance to say Crash would have been better off as a book or animated feature. Its safe to say no one would want that anyway. After all, the memories of these games are built from the tough platforming, the exaggerated animation, and catchy tunes.
Your goal in these games is as straight forward as getting from point A to point B. Most stages have the player running forward while avoiding enemies, collecting fruit, and destroying crates. The crates offer fruit, lives and masks. Every one hundred fruit collected grants an extra live while the masks will prevent Crash from dying when he takes damage. Some stages will have Crash running towards the screen away from large creatures or giant boulders. Other stages see Crash and his sister riding various animal or motorcycles.
The boss stages are highlights as each one offers new and different challenges to overcome. Also, each normal stage has a bonus section which can be retried over and over without costing lives. These bonus areas are wonderful as the naturally progress in difficulty and often test newly acquired skills. Across the three games the core difficulty does seem to get easier as the series goes on but this is mostly just do to better balancing. For those who really need a challenge all the stages can be replayed for speed and crate completion gems.
The Crash games had a distinct and colorful style before but this remaster takes the series to the next level. Where as a lot of remakes are content just just polishing up Vicarious Visions really brings new life into the characters and the environments. The lighting is spot on and every detail pops right out of the screen. To compliment the gorgeous visuals is the wonderful soundtrack. All the same quirky, catchy, tunes are back and sound better than ever.
Overall these games hold up quite well. It was fun to play through the whole series again however there is much reason to go back and keep playing. Yes there are the bonus challenges but the repetition and difficulty spikes is deterring. It would have been nice to see some new features added. Being such a fast paced game not having an option to quickly restart a stage is killer. Also the time from launching the game to actually playing is a bit ludicrous. As a whole there is a lot of value in this package but its not quite all it could have been. You've bound to have fun playing these silly platformers but only the die hard fans will keep coming back.