Unless you're looking to buy a really shiny coaster for your coffee table...DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!!!
User Rating: 2.5 | Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex (Platinum) PS2
Well, the time has come. My review for Crash. First, a brief bio – For those who don’t know already (which, I’m sure, consists of every single one of you) after becoming a member of GameSpot, I spent hours upon hours patiently waiting for the moment I would attain Level 6 and thereby be able to review games. The reason for this is simple – I wanted to review this very game – Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. And since there’s no mystery here (you’ve seen my score after all!!!) I will cut to the chase…I HATE THIS GAME!!!! It should also be mentioned that I received this game years ago as a gift and have not played the wretched thing since. However, not to be accused of relying upon old memories to form the opinions within this review, I did something I swore I’d never do again – I popped the game back into my PS2 and booted it up. Not surprisingly, I hated it just as much yesterday as I did a couple years ago. Now then, with the back story complete, let’s get to what actually boils my blood when playing this game… Oh, where to begin? Sure, the game is uninspired to say the least – unoriginal, unexciting, uninteresting, unsatisfactory even by yesterday’s standards, and just plain unfun. And definitely undeserving of spinning within your PS2’s disc tray. But, no. Let’s begin with its most horribly glaring defect – Loading times. Okay, so to make sure that no one also accuses me of being vague here, I pulled out my trusty stopwatch and timed this stuff. So here goes. This is how a new game will play out from startup – Boot up from PS2 logo to first available option - 1 minute 10 seconds. From there it takes 1 minute after entering your screen name to the next option. From there, 40 seconds to the beginning (warp room); another 10 seconds to a cut scene and finally 50 seconds from the first cut scene to the playable level itself. Note that I'm not including any time for cut-scenes, name registration or character manipulation here. This is ALL loading times. When you add all these numbers up you get 3 minutes and 50 seconds of load time and you haven’t even touched the game itself. But wait, it gets worse. Though this initial loading time might be a simple annoyance if it were the only problem; the actual frustration hits you the hardest as you play the game itself. For example, you should prepare to sit and watch a load screen for a minimum of 40 seconds and up to 1 minute (and some instances longer) EACH time you enter AND exit a level. This might not seem horrible on paper but consider this other little fact. As I played through Level 2 (on my first try) I was finished with it in 1 minute 20 seconds (official time trial score 1:13). Do you get what I’m saying? It took me MORE TIME TO LOAD AND EXIT THE LEVEL THAN ACTUALLY PLAY IT!!! And never did my actual playing time on other levels exceed more than 6 minutes and this was only because I kept dying over and over and over again because of a horrible camera flaw that prohibited me from finishing the level properly! Alright then. Point made. Just keep in mind that you should expect to sit and watch the game load at least a third as much as you’ll actually play it. That said, let’s move on to other things. Graphics – Mediocre is the best I can say about the visuals in this game, though strangely they are its best feature. It’s a cartoony game. And don’t get me wrong, I like cartoony. I liked the Mario Bros. games ten, fifteen years ago. I liked Sonic and Rayman. This game is similar. Far, far, far less inspired than Rayman. Not as cute as Mario. You get what I’m saying. It’s an okay looking game. Does barely enough to get the job done, but not a pinch more. Audio – Again, there isn’t much to say about it. Uninspired at best. It’s there, makes noise and all, but you’ll never really care about it. Musically, its paramount achievement will be that you’ll likely forget it after you quit playing (assuming you even hear it at all). Its worst achievement will be annoyance from the redundancy of hearing the same irritating clatter over and over and over and over and over and over again. The sound effects in the game are bargain basement, generic, nothing you haven’t heard before. Nothing you yourself can't go and download off the Internet – nothing that stands out by any measure. The vocal performances are not exceptionally bad, but the writing certainly is. Here’s just one of the insipid quotes you’ll hear (this one’s from a floating mask): “I’m gonna shake, rattle and roll your Bandicoot butt!” Okay, so, um – Let’s get it on? I guess? Story – Do you really care? I mean, admittedly, I never came close to finishing this piece of rubbish, so I can’t really give away any spoilers here. But, let’s just say there’s this rodent and he spins a lot and there’s this big headed guy and we think there’s a distinct possibility that he might want to rule the world or something. That’s about it. And we assume the good guy wins in the end (though I have every reason to believe you’ll never want to get this far to find out). Gameplay – Now here’s a real reason to hate the game. It’s bad. Simple at best, unresponsive at worst. Seriously, there are NES games with better control than this game. And despite the lack of good control over Mr. Bandicoot, there just isn’t that much to do. Let’s break it down into two categories – 1. Movement and 2. Interactive options. Movement – You can seemingly move Crash around within a 3D environment. I use the word seemingly for a reason. Though this game tries in some ways to resemble a 3D game, it’s really a 2D game at its core. This alone should not be much of a problem; Klonoa 2 did it very well by designing the levels to play out in a 2D manner (side scrolling in the same style as the original Mario games and such) while the aesthetics of the scenery moved in somewhat of a 3D manner. It was effective and a nice touch. Crash, on the other hand, does not try to stick to any 2D conventions at all, but rather gives you an arena in which you should be able to roam (like in any good 3D platformer, e.g. Ratchet or Jak) but in reality only allows your range of movement to be stuck to such a restrictively linear path that it turns out to be really nothing more than a 3D wannabe and ends up combining the worst of all worlds. And I can’t tell you how many times I’d see a path or opening that I’d want to explore only to find that its only real purpose was for scenery’s sake. Moreover, there is no way to move the camera at all since the path is so fixed that everything you need to see is always right there in front of you – except, unfortunately, this is only in principle since some times it does not actually play out like it should. In fact, there are times when this limitation gets so maddeningly in the way of progress that you’ll probably lose a dozen lives just trying. A glaring example – in one stage you have to run away from a pursuing dragon while the camera is in front of Crash as he runs toward you. This is in no way unique to this game, it’s been done before, but since your chance of survival is dependent upon seeing where you are going, it can get ridiculously frustrating when you arrive at pits that will end your life and you can’t judge the appropriate time to jump since there is some sort of vapor coming out of the them. In other words, as you play through this level you’ll find yourself thinking you’ve made the correct judgment in timing your jumps to avoid falling into the pits (which will instantly end one of your lives) but you’re never quite able to see the ledge of the pit to actually time the jump properly. I died many times not because my reflexes were poor, but because I simply could not see the point at which I was supposed to jump. On top of that, in this particular level, there are crates you can bash open to receive extra fruit (that adds up to more lives) or extra lives by themselves, but the problem here is that every time you bash a crate as you run, you don’t have enough time to actually collect the stinkin' things unless you slow down and do a little backtracking and of course if you do, then the dragon will catch you, so what’s the point? Interactive options – Pretty limited. You can push a button to pull off a spin attack. This seems to kill most enemies if you make contact, but there’s no real strategy involved. Get near a bad guy, tap spin and move on. Big deal. In an attempt to add some variety, it seems, there is the inclusion of certain enemies that are invulnerable to the spin attack, but even then you simply push a different button and viola, you perform a slide attack instead that will kick them away rather than spinning them. The differences between the two are merely cosmetic and really, do you care whether you’re spinning or sliding enemies? Neither is particularly fun. Beyond these two options, you of course can jump and when you’re mid-air you can do a sort of stomp on some things, but I only found this to be of use when bashing crates and such, so again who cares? Instead of cracking open a crate with your spin move you can stomp it instead. Big wup. And when all is said and done, there is simply no flow to the controls and in fact they are the antithesis of intuitive. Jumping, spinning, sliding and the overall movement of the character is clunky, awkward and very, very unrewarding. Now, one of the things that should have made this game better is that many of the levels are varied in the types of gameplay you are allowed. One level you’ll be running on foot, another you’ll be rolling in a ball, another you’ll be flying a plane, another you’ll be in a truck…but again the options are so limited with each of these that none is particularly enjoyable and in fact they end up being so similar in most cases that it won’t feel as if you’ve done a whole lot different. Enemy AI – There is none. You’ll find that the enemies do one of two things – either patrol a very small area in a back and forth motion, oblivious to your existence; or stand fixed in place while spraying toxic substances (green goo and such) in a back and forth motion while again, oblivious to your existence. Nobody chases you, nobody attacks you…nobody seems to care. They simple follow their set patterns and if you happen to accidentally bump into them, well, then you’re dead. Are you with me so far? Have a stated my case succinctly? I suppose there’s more I could go on and on about, but what’s the point? I hate this game and you should too. I mean, in some ways this piece of drivel has become my own person enemy. It’s taken on a sort of metaphysical nature that vexes me in ways no other game ever has. Even right down to the noises it makes while spinning inside the PS2 – it emits this constant tick…tick-tick sound incessantly. Over and over again, the hardware keeps going tick…tick-tick…tick…tick-tick. Is it mocking me? Is it pecking at my brain on some subconscious level? I don’t know. However, I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s as if the game has taken on its own iniquitous personality that smites my sensibilities on every single level of existence. It makes me question my faith in humanity and God. If there truly is a God, why oh why would Crash Bandicoot be allowed to exist? But maybe that’s just me. Dunno. In any event please, please, please don’t play this game. Ever. And in conclusion I’d like to say that this was exceptionally cathartic for me. Thank you for letting me vent. Years of bottled-up frustration have finally been removed from my shoulders. I can once again walk tall. And now I think I’ll go and write some favorable reviews of good games that you should be playing instead of this shameful hunk of dung.
