Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex
released on Oct 29, 2001
Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex is the fourth mainline series game and the first to feature Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation 2. It was later ported to the GameCube and Xbox, making it his first multiplatform appearance. The player controls Crash and his younger sister Coco who must gather 25 crystals and defeat the main antagonists of the story, Doctor Neo Cortex and his new super weapon Crunch Bandicoot. Much of the game takes place in a Virtual Reality Hub System created by Coco to help Crash gather the crystals. The gameplay is similar to the older games of the series.
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Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex offers more familiar Crash platforming action, but it starts to show the series' age. The level designs feel less fresh and dynamic compared to the classics on the PlayStation 1. The new VR hub system is a bit tedious to navigate, and the vehicle levels tend to be frustrating rather than fun. While there's still some zany Crash charm, The Wrath of Cortex feels more like a relic of its time than a must-play for platformer fans.
Having not played earlier games in the series, I don't have a point of comparison. That said, most of the levels were fun and the bosses were generally interesting and enjoyable. The 'laboratory' levels all start looking a little same-y after awhile, but the other levels looked good. Unfortunately, the vehicle and Coco levels were quite a bit worse than the Crash levels, which dragged the game down a bit.
The Crash series makes its debut on the next generation of consoles, and it's forgoing PlayStation exclusivity, as it's now also going on the Nintendo GameCube and Xbox.
Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex follows up the last game, as Crash and Coco must once again stop Cortex and Uka Uka from taking over the world... but they've got company this time, with new rival, Crunch!
Also, the Elemental Masks are also here to cause a ruckus, so we have new enemies this time.
And that's where this game's originality sort-of ends. Of course, there are a few more things, but this game borrows heavity from Crash 3, that it many aspects, one can call this game a rehash.
There are new aesthetics this go around, in addition to old ones, but many of these new themes only last one or two levels, because this game's name is inconsistency.
Remember in my Crash 3 review how I said that the game's vehicles and how many there were could be a point of contention amongst fans?
This game has even more vehicles, and some of them are not really fun to control, like the aerial fly-like vehicle. With that one, you can only shoot after you've locked-on, which takes a bit, and leaves you vulnerable to enemy attacks. I find this one really dumb, because they already had used the airplane from Crash 3 earlier in the game, so why introduce this new, inferior one?
There's also the mech, which its jump while standing still is horrible, and there's the mini-submarine, which its turning is really slow.
It's not all bad, for example, the game's new ball levels were actually pretty fun to go through, but there were only 3 of them, so they barely got fleshed out.
And that's the thing, this game barely fleshes out anything because it's constantly switching things up.
Like Coco herself is playable without any vehicles... for like 2 levels, I believe. And I liked playing as her. I know she's inferior to Crash since her moveset is just jumping and spinning, but I don't know, I actually liked that simplicity.
But again, you don't get to play as her that much, so I'm left unsatisfied and underwhelmed.
The game's presentation is also pretty underwhelming. The characters look pretty ugly in general, especially Cortex. Although the game's voice acting does pick up the slack, as we have new voice actors joining in like Mark Hamill, Thomas Wilson and Jess Harnell, and their performances were really good, in spite of their lines being very bland.
The music as well was also pretty good, reminded me a lot of Traveller's Tales previous work, like their soundtrack on the Toy Story 2 video game.
Overall, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, while not a bad game, just leaves me underwhelmed.
Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex follows up the last game, as Crash and Coco must once again stop Cortex and Uka Uka from taking over the world... but they've got company this time, with new rival, Crunch!
Also, the Elemental Masks are also here to cause a ruckus, so we have new enemies this time.
And that's where this game's originality sort-of ends. Of course, there are a few more things, but this game borrows heavity from Crash 3, that it many aspects, one can call this game a rehash.
There are new aesthetics this go around, in addition to old ones, but many of these new themes only last one or two levels, because this game's name is inconsistency.
Remember in my Crash 3 review how I said that the game's vehicles and how many there were could be a point of contention amongst fans?
This game has even more vehicles, and some of them are not really fun to control, like the aerial fly-like vehicle. With that one, you can only shoot after you've locked-on, which takes a bit, and leaves you vulnerable to enemy attacks. I find this one really dumb, because they already had used the airplane from Crash 3 earlier in the game, so why introduce this new, inferior one?
There's also the mech, which its jump while standing still is horrible, and there's the mini-submarine, which its turning is really slow.
It's not all bad, for example, the game's new ball levels were actually pretty fun to go through, but there were only 3 of them, so they barely got fleshed out.
And that's the thing, this game barely fleshes out anything because it's constantly switching things up.
Like Coco herself is playable without any vehicles... for like 2 levels, I believe. And I liked playing as her. I know she's inferior to Crash since her moveset is just jumping and spinning, but I don't know, I actually liked that simplicity.
But again, you don't get to play as her that much, so I'm left unsatisfied and underwhelmed.
The game's presentation is also pretty underwhelming. The characters look pretty ugly in general, especially Cortex. Although the game's voice acting does pick up the slack, as we have new voice actors joining in like Mark Hamill, Thomas Wilson and Jess Harnell, and their performances were really good, in spite of their lines being very bland.
The music as well was also pretty good, reminded me a lot of Traveller's Tales previous work, like their soundtrack on the Toy Story 2 video game.
Overall, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, while not a bad game, just leaves me underwhelmed.
hese crash
It's Crash 3, again. The graphics suck for the most part and there's plenty of bugs to find but it's understandable since this was an early gen game that apparently had a rushed development. BUT! The soundtrack slaps (as usual for most Crash games), and the platforming sections are very fun and sometimes better than 3, i think? The worst parts of this game are definitely the vehicles sections with the worst controls ever seen by any game ever probably, maybe, idk (except for the hamster ball ones those are awesome) but overall, it's not a bad experience. If you've never played Wrath of Cortex because of the mixed reviews, i think you should give it a chance! It isn't as bad as people make it out to be, even if the game can be very rough at times. I find it more enjoyable than Warped for the most part.
This game, so far, extremely fascinates me. The game is like an alternate universe version of Warped if it was extremely mid. Like, not even bad. I just wonder what happened during development for the game to come out like this? The visuals of the environments go back and forth between looking really nice to really awful, and the character model quality varies heavily (usually leaning towards looking bad). Aku-Aku invincibility states don't have a clear indicator of when they end because the invincibility music is way more quiet and subtle compared to the loud tribal drums that clearly gave you a sign of when they're about to end, and your hitbox is not increased. Lots of sound effects either don't play when they're supposed to or they're mixed incorrectly. The music is often very good (ESPECIALLY for Cortex Vortex and Eskimo Roll), but it's also mixed so poorly that I sometimes can't hear it even when the game is at max volume.
But despite all that, the level design itself isn't awful? I actually like the way the levels are laid out in this game, they're just dreadful to actually play because Crash and Coco control so terribly. They're extremely floaty and slow. They feel like if you stuck a Lego Star Wars character into Crash Bandicoot. Normally, Lego Star Wars feels very fine to control, but Crash shouldn't feel like this.
The boss fights mostly suck. Rok-Ko's fight was a cool idea, but the execution fell flat because the ball controls are terrible outside of the ball levels designed for them. Wa-Wa isn't even a boss fight against him and Crunch, you're really fighting against the camera and the terrible depth perception above instant-kill water and projectiles. I also probably spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out how to beat Py-Ro before I realized that shooting the water cannon on the mech suit slows you down when you're chasing him back to the other side. It took me ages to realize what I was doing wrong, but the fight is piss-easy otherwise. Lo-Lo actually has a really fun boss fight that I enjoyed, probably only because it was copied from N. Gin's Crash 3 fight. The final boss was anticlimactic, but REALLY good! I actually like the Cortex/Crunch fight a lot! But yeah, the Elementals are extremely disappointing, as underdeveloped characters with underdeveloped boss fights.
That issue of depth perception I mentioned for Wa-Wa actually has affected my whole experience with the game. I can't tell if I'm being tricked because Crash moves so slowly compared to the previous games that I think he should be farther ahead than he really is, or if it's because of the collision of the character being bad, or if it's because the camera is so terrible that I can't tell how close or far something is from Crash. I'm misjudging the distance of so many jumps and enemies, taking contact damage, falling into pits, and whiffing spin attacks that you'd think I'm a brand new player based on how poorly I've been doing in the first 3 worlds of the game, as I write my initial thoughts. I literally have never had this issue with the PS1 games so I'm not sure what's the problem here.
This is one of those games that I think REALLY deserves a remake, though I'm typically opposed to the idea of game remakes, generally. You don't have to change anything, just adjust the controls, stick the game in a new engine, and give the game the polish it lacks. I think it would be way more passable if just a few things were tweaked.
EDIT: I wrote this review before fully completing the game, so I wanted to add on at the end that I had a way better time getting all the Platinum Relics in this game than I did playing most of these stages normally. With a few exceptions, this game was extremely easy to get the Plat Relics for. The issue of depth perception will always be a problem, and made some relics way harder to get than others because you waste time whiffing so many spin attacks and jumps, but using the Crash Dash somewhat remedied the control problems I complained about. It sucks that this is a post-game powerup that exists only for getting Relics, but it was like that in Warped as well. Unlike Warped, though, Crash controlled completely fine at normal speeds so it felt like a proper powerup rather than a fix for slow and floaty controls.
Also, after understanding the circumstances the game was made under, I'm a little nicer towards it. It was supposed to have been a next-gen, ambitious experience, and Traveller's Tales had to restart development partway through and finish in 12 months. That explains why so much of the game is like a worse version of Warped, they probably tried to refer back to it and base the new game off it as closely as possible in the time they had. It doesn't excuse the quality entirely, but I understand how it turned out the way it did.
But despite all that, the level design itself isn't awful? I actually like the way the levels are laid out in this game, they're just dreadful to actually play because Crash and Coco control so terribly. They're extremely floaty and slow. They feel like if you stuck a Lego Star Wars character into Crash Bandicoot. Normally, Lego Star Wars feels very fine to control, but Crash shouldn't feel like this.
The boss fights mostly suck. Rok-Ko's fight was a cool idea, but the execution fell flat because the ball controls are terrible outside of the ball levels designed for them. Wa-Wa isn't even a boss fight against him and Crunch, you're really fighting against the camera and the terrible depth perception above instant-kill water and projectiles. I also probably spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out how to beat Py-Ro before I realized that shooting the water cannon on the mech suit slows you down when you're chasing him back to the other side. It took me ages to realize what I was doing wrong, but the fight is piss-easy otherwise. Lo-Lo actually has a really fun boss fight that I enjoyed, probably only because it was copied from N. Gin's Crash 3 fight. The final boss was anticlimactic, but REALLY good! I actually like the Cortex/Crunch fight a lot! But yeah, the Elementals are extremely disappointing, as underdeveloped characters with underdeveloped boss fights.
That issue of depth perception I mentioned for Wa-Wa actually has affected my whole experience with the game. I can't tell if I'm being tricked because Crash moves so slowly compared to the previous games that I think he should be farther ahead than he really is, or if it's because of the collision of the character being bad, or if it's because the camera is so terrible that I can't tell how close or far something is from Crash. I'm misjudging the distance of so many jumps and enemies, taking contact damage, falling into pits, and whiffing spin attacks that you'd think I'm a brand new player based on how poorly I've been doing in the first 3 worlds of the game, as I write my initial thoughts. I literally have never had this issue with the PS1 games so I'm not sure what's the problem here.
This is one of those games that I think REALLY deserves a remake, though I'm typically opposed to the idea of game remakes, generally. You don't have to change anything, just adjust the controls, stick the game in a new engine, and give the game the polish it lacks. I think it would be way more passable if just a few things were tweaked.
EDIT: I wrote this review before fully completing the game, so I wanted to add on at the end that I had a way better time getting all the Platinum Relics in this game than I did playing most of these stages normally. With a few exceptions, this game was extremely easy to get the Plat Relics for. The issue of depth perception will always be a problem, and made some relics way harder to get than others because you waste time whiffing so many spin attacks and jumps, but using the Crash Dash somewhat remedied the control problems I complained about. It sucks that this is a post-game powerup that exists only for getting Relics, but it was like that in Warped as well. Unlike Warped, though, Crash controlled completely fine at normal speeds so it felt like a proper powerup rather than a fix for slow and floaty controls.
Also, after understanding the circumstances the game was made under, I'm a little nicer towards it. It was supposed to have been a next-gen, ambitious experience, and Traveller's Tales had to restart development partway through and finish in 12 months. That explains why so much of the game is like a worse version of Warped, they probably tried to refer back to it and base the new game off it as closely as possible in the time they had. It doesn't excuse the quality entirely, but I understand how it turned out the way it did.