Crash Bandicoot was a platforming series developed by Naughty Dog for the PlayStation and stood toe to toe with Nintendo's Mario in quality and presentation. Unfortunately, Crash's reign came to an end when Naughty Dog no longer had interest in the series and moved on to Jak and Daxter. Universal had to look for a new developer to keep the series going. First up was Eurocom who developed Crash Bash for the PSX which was a decent game. A bit of a Mario Party clone perhaps but it was a fresh take on Crash and the game at least offered something new to the series. Eurocom also handled the Crash characters with dignity and respect. However for whatever reason, that was the only Crash game Eurocom made.
Universal then decided Traveler's Tales would be the ones to take the series to the next generation. How did this game stack up? One word, mediocre. First things first, this game was developed to do virtually exactly the same thing as Crash Bandicoot 3 Warped. Not one thing about this game moved the series forward or brought anything new to the platforming genre whatsoever. Looks like either Traveler's Tales played it safe or the game was rushed. The answer? Both. The game originally was supposed to be more of an open ended 3-D platformer but because of the holiday deadline, they scraped that idea and went with the traditional 2-D platforming elements.
What did the game try to do that they thought would make Crash better? They made the levels bigger, added more boxes to get, and added more vehicle levels....way too much vehicles. The vehicles seemed more gimmicky than ever and the worst part is they weren't that fun, more tedious then anything. Crash is at his best with more platforming, not vehicles. While Crash 2 and 3 had some vehicles, they were actually fun and controlled great(other than that damn bike in 3). Some were used for such a short period of time, they didn't add anything useful to the game. Also some had poor execution. The pinball like vehicle Crash was in was a good idea and it had some fun elements but it got overused and towards later levels, it got too tedious with the brutal level designs. Speaking on the levels, as a whole, yes they were bigger and had more boxes but it came to a point where it had too much extra boxes and the levels were a chore to finish. More is not always better. What's worse is the game had time relics again and unlike Crash 3 where the levels were designed perfectly for speed-running, these levels were not. Speed-running through these levels was not enjoyable to say the least and especially with the broken vehicle segments. Some levels were such a chore, playing them again was more dreadful than actually exciting. Not good. Wanting a level to be over with is not something anyone should ever experience in a game.
Did this game really seem like an upgrade over the PSX? Not at all. The PS2 graphics were actually worse with dreadful character designs(Crash looked okay though) the music was worse, and some of the music was so out of place. The avalanche level music is a good example. Only thing that seemed to be a step up was the boss fights. They surprisingly were harder then previous games and added a challenge unlike the previous games which were notorious for easy bosses so hats off to that at least. The story wasn't all that exciting either and again was a rip off of Crash 3. Even the power-ups you gained after the bosses were mostly the same other than the first one, which was lame and useless.
In conclusion, was this a bad game? No because it was playable, didn't have many bugs other than long loads times which was fixed with newer copies, and it does everything the other games did before. It certainly didn't suffer the terrible fate it's cousin, Spyro did. If this was your first Crash game, perhaps it can be enjoyable which is great but go back to the Naughty Dog games and you'll see how much better the series was before. A few of the levels that focused on the platforming were somewhat entertaining, but for a series that had to step up to the next generation of gaming during the early 2000s, it just couldn't stack up to any of the competition. A character that was once Sony's unofficial mascot seemed to have been let down. This game honestly marked the end to an era. Crash's quality dropped not only with this game but this was a pattern where it only continued as more Crash games were developed by several more different developers where it seemed to lose it's identity that it couldn't get back....until 2017 at least.