17 Reviews liked by Daitarn3
Honestly one of the most pleasant surprises of 2021 so far. I'll admit to being far from charitable when this was first announced, entirely because its artstyle just did not hit my flavour palette right. However, after immersing myself in the game for a while, the pin-puppet and painterly style grew on me immensely, and it all culminates with its wonderful storybook presentation. I particularly enjoyed how even the levels themselves were thoroughly animated, using the tweening animation style to warp unrecognisably at points. Reminded me a lot of Rayman Legends levels.
This is the first Ghosts 'n Goblins game I've ever played, and I'll never pretend to be the biggest fan of masocore style gameplay or anything. But, Resurrection feels so tightly designed I was happy to put up with its cheeky bullshit and finally complete it on Legend difficulty. One thing I was particularly taken aback by was how much depth the game could wrangle out of relatively simple player controls - four directions, an attack button and a single jump with a fixed arc. While the level design is relatively cruel with its enemy placements and platforming, it never feels like I needed anything else. With the chests giving sequentially better rewards and gold armour that powers up your current weapon, every moment acts as a risk/reward assessment that could be the difference between life or death, and it is engaging to wonderfully stressful degrees right until the very end. Memorisation is king, so once I learned that every single hazard, enemy or boss in the game has quirks I could read and exploit, it all felt amazing. Music slaps too.
It does have some things that drag the experience down for me, though. For example, I'm not a fan of how weapon pickups persist through death - meaning that you could have a favourite weapon and lose it semi-permanently should you accidentally pick up something else. This problem is kind of compounded by the fact that the Knife is the best in the game by a shocking margin. Get knocked into a useless piece of shit like the Ball or something, and you're stuck with that until you luck out and get the Knife back again.
Completely unconvinced by the skill tree system in this game too. Levels will have a handful of Whisps hidden throughout; they generally trigger when you perform a certain action and remain permanently obtained even should you die after getting one. Some of which I swear are placed, so you HAVE to jump into a guaranteed death to obtain, and often quite far away from the last checkpoint. I found that this is the game giving the OK sign to suicide runs, which is imo a fuckin stupid plethora of unnecessary deaths for an already hard as nails game. It's a little annoying that there are a few genuinely game-changing good abilities you can unlock through obtaining them, like weapon slots and spell switching. I wish these abilities were just present in the game without such an extraneous system gatekeeping them.
I heard a review for this game mention that Super Ghosts n Goblins has the golden armour unlock unique skills for your chosen weapon, which sounds great!!
Should also note that the game also has a bunch of difficulty options and you can set them according to your comfort level.
This is the first Ghosts 'n Goblins game I've ever played, and I'll never pretend to be the biggest fan of masocore style gameplay or anything. But, Resurrection feels so tightly designed I was happy to put up with its cheeky bullshit and finally complete it on Legend difficulty. One thing I was particularly taken aback by was how much depth the game could wrangle out of relatively simple player controls - four directions, an attack button and a single jump with a fixed arc. While the level design is relatively cruel with its enemy placements and platforming, it never feels like I needed anything else. With the chests giving sequentially better rewards and gold armour that powers up your current weapon, every moment acts as a risk/reward assessment that could be the difference between life or death, and it is engaging to wonderfully stressful degrees right until the very end. Memorisation is king, so once I learned that every single hazard, enemy or boss in the game has quirks I could read and exploit, it all felt amazing. Music slaps too.
It does have some things that drag the experience down for me, though. For example, I'm not a fan of how weapon pickups persist through death - meaning that you could have a favourite weapon and lose it semi-permanently should you accidentally pick up something else. This problem is kind of compounded by the fact that the Knife is the best in the game by a shocking margin. Get knocked into a useless piece of shit like the Ball or something, and you're stuck with that until you luck out and get the Knife back again.
Completely unconvinced by the skill tree system in this game too. Levels will have a handful of Whisps hidden throughout; they generally trigger when you perform a certain action and remain permanently obtained even should you die after getting one. Some of which I swear are placed, so you HAVE to jump into a guaranteed death to obtain, and often quite far away from the last checkpoint. I found that this is the game giving the OK sign to suicide runs, which is imo a fuckin stupid plethora of unnecessary deaths for an already hard as nails game. It's a little annoying that there are a few genuinely game-changing good abilities you can unlock through obtaining them, like weapon slots and spell switching. I wish these abilities were just present in the game without such an extraneous system gatekeeping them.
I heard a review for this game mention that Super Ghosts n Goblins has the golden armour unlock unique skills for your chosen weapon, which sounds great!!
Should also note that the game also has a bunch of difficulty options and you can set them according to your comfort level.
My god, what a success. I've never played a franchise revival that gets so much right. Toys For Bob have proven that they understand much of the original Crash trilogy's appeal and that the series still has plenty of wriggle room for growth that the subsequent Crash outings weren't inspired enough to capitalise on.
Linear corridor-pushing platforming is back to Crash again with a base moveset as shrunken down as it was in 2 more specifically. What ensues are levels that are meticulously and appropriately balanced towards tight and challenging platforming around your more limited toolset. The devs have said "When we think about hazards and enemies and how they’re distributed, they stream across in almost a rhythmic way, so we’ve been really focused on how do we maximize that and use that differentiation to really push Crash gameplay", and that much is demonstrated in how the game retains the core trilogy tenets while also being more momentum-based than before.
For variance, new masks are thrown into the mix with controlled segments that require you to make use of their unique abilities - as well as entire characters that control very differently from the heroes. This is about as welcome as this kind of shakeup could be, these levels being immediately more cognisantly put together than the more extraneous-feeling vehicle segments in Crash 3. It's so nice that they're rarely ever necessary for completion, too, if the player doesn't happen to be keen on the way any given side character's levels play out.
I'd be remiss not to mention how gorgeous the game is. Toys For Bob seemed like the right choice for Crash after their art team's stellar work on the Spyro Reignited trilogy - proving that they are essentially the masters of stage and character design, adding details and changes to the base work that make the world feel effervescent.
I LOVE what they've done with the character redesigns here, taking their old shapes and making them as stylised and expressive as the GPU can handle. Coco's new style is a particular standout; she's never looked this good. Cortex's taller design is quite enlightened too. It suits his character so perfectly for him to try and look as big as he thinks he is, only for him to be a wee rodent when anyone else in the cast enters the frame.
It feels almost cruel and unfair to compare 4 to the remake trilogy that came out just a few years prior, but it's worth noting how incredibly dated that game already looks. A remake mired in bizarre visual choices that, while all minor in the grand scheme of things, illustrates a full image of a team that doesn't know what to do with the paints provided. I wish I could embed images for comparison's sake, but please believe me when you can pinpoint any minute detail from 4 (the water, fire effects, character shadows, foliage, animation, the list goes on) to their direct counterpart in the remake to see it almost completely botched. It all sounds like nitpicking, and it is, but art is an art babye.
https://twitter.com/BeachEpisode/status/1382872345321291785
Where things get particularly interesting with Crash 4 is sadly also where my problems begin. If you were to go into 4 with the same completionist ethos as you would in the OG trilogy, you'd get chewed up and spat out by some senselessly cruel design choices that are actually quite baffling. Crash 4 should act as a case study for how much goodwill can be diminished by level after level of "fuck you", bosshi-like cruelty. Where 100%'ing a given Crash game used to simply add about five or so hours onto the total playtime as you aim for optional collectables, 4 is quite literally padded front and back, forcing you to play through each given level (twice), with an "N.verted" visual filter. Doubling the level count in the laziest way conceivable. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the levels in Crash 4 are considerably longer and more densely packed with crates than ever before. I have to specify; it's not so much the difficulty being the problem; the content surrounding the difficulty is so disproportionately bloated. Racking up tens of minutes in a single level as you try to break every crate you can as you scan every nook and cranny with a fine-tooth comb, only for you to come to the end of a level, one crate short, it's enough to knock a star off a total score (and it did).
One of Crash 4's best elements is how unpredictable it is from a pacing standpoint. There are numerous points where you think you're in the final runup to the end only for the trapdoor beneath you to fall out, revealing a whole new slew of levels. This would normally be quite exciting, if not for how easily you could get burnt out at any point by the game's padded nature, making it hard to savour how much of a rambling journey the game takes you on. Sure, you could ignore these side things and sprint to the ending. You'd definitely finish the game with a more positive take away than me! But I am a simple man who wants those unlockable skins.
While I'm effortposting far too much about this orange marsupial game, I might as well add that I love the interdimensional story this game is trying to tell. Its sense of humour gets me to a tee and is filled with very subtle winks to even the prior games that are now rendered "not canon". Cutscenes with incredible squash n stretch tex avery loony tunes esque animation that conveys character better than any game I've ever played. I love it to death.
Crash 4 is a fleshed out, wonderfully well-studied sequel. Built with a uniquely high grade of technical skill that is often diminished by design choices that can feel a little misguided. This is one of the most concrete building blocks I have ever played, and is one iteration away from complete perfection to my eyes. (Like... just make it so the checkpoint boxes tell you how many crates you missed. That would help SO MUCH). I'm hoping Toys For Bob continue pumping out wall to wall bangers now that Skylanders seems to have bitten the dust; they're more qualified than most to make gorgeous, satisfying and engaging platformers that are absolutely drenched in personality.
Linear corridor-pushing platforming is back to Crash again with a base moveset as shrunken down as it was in 2 more specifically. What ensues are levels that are meticulously and appropriately balanced towards tight and challenging platforming around your more limited toolset. The devs have said "When we think about hazards and enemies and how they’re distributed, they stream across in almost a rhythmic way, so we’ve been really focused on how do we maximize that and use that differentiation to really push Crash gameplay", and that much is demonstrated in how the game retains the core trilogy tenets while also being more momentum-based than before.
For variance, new masks are thrown into the mix with controlled segments that require you to make use of their unique abilities - as well as entire characters that control very differently from the heroes. This is about as welcome as this kind of shakeup could be, these levels being immediately more cognisantly put together than the more extraneous-feeling vehicle segments in Crash 3. It's so nice that they're rarely ever necessary for completion, too, if the player doesn't happen to be keen on the way any given side character's levels play out.
I'd be remiss not to mention how gorgeous the game is. Toys For Bob seemed like the right choice for Crash after their art team's stellar work on the Spyro Reignited trilogy - proving that they are essentially the masters of stage and character design, adding details and changes to the base work that make the world feel effervescent.
I LOVE what they've done with the character redesigns here, taking their old shapes and making them as stylised and expressive as the GPU can handle. Coco's new style is a particular standout; she's never looked this good. Cortex's taller design is quite enlightened too. It suits his character so perfectly for him to try and look as big as he thinks he is, only for him to be a wee rodent when anyone else in the cast enters the frame.
It feels almost cruel and unfair to compare 4 to the remake trilogy that came out just a few years prior, but it's worth noting how incredibly dated that game already looks. A remake mired in bizarre visual choices that, while all minor in the grand scheme of things, illustrates a full image of a team that doesn't know what to do with the paints provided. I wish I could embed images for comparison's sake, but please believe me when you can pinpoint any minute detail from 4 (the water, fire effects, character shadows, foliage, animation, the list goes on) to their direct counterpart in the remake to see it almost completely botched. It all sounds like nitpicking, and it is, but art is an art babye.
https://twitter.com/BeachEpisode/status/1382872345321291785
Where things get particularly interesting with Crash 4 is sadly also where my problems begin. If you were to go into 4 with the same completionist ethos as you would in the OG trilogy, you'd get chewed up and spat out by some senselessly cruel design choices that are actually quite baffling. Crash 4 should act as a case study for how much goodwill can be diminished by level after level of "fuck you", bosshi-like cruelty. Where 100%'ing a given Crash game used to simply add about five or so hours onto the total playtime as you aim for optional collectables, 4 is quite literally padded front and back, forcing you to play through each given level (twice), with an "N.verted" visual filter. Doubling the level count in the laziest way conceivable. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the levels in Crash 4 are considerably longer and more densely packed with crates than ever before. I have to specify; it's not so much the difficulty being the problem; the content surrounding the difficulty is so disproportionately bloated. Racking up tens of minutes in a single level as you try to break every crate you can as you scan every nook and cranny with a fine-tooth comb, only for you to come to the end of a level, one crate short, it's enough to knock a star off a total score (and it did).
One of Crash 4's best elements is how unpredictable it is from a pacing standpoint. There are numerous points where you think you're in the final runup to the end only for the trapdoor beneath you to fall out, revealing a whole new slew of levels. This would normally be quite exciting, if not for how easily you could get burnt out at any point by the game's padded nature, making it hard to savour how much of a rambling journey the game takes you on. Sure, you could ignore these side things and sprint to the ending. You'd definitely finish the game with a more positive take away than me! But I am a simple man who wants those unlockable skins.
While I'm effortposting far too much about this orange marsupial game, I might as well add that I love the interdimensional story this game is trying to tell. Its sense of humour gets me to a tee and is filled with very subtle winks to even the prior games that are now rendered "not canon". Cutscenes with incredible squash n stretch tex avery loony tunes esque animation that conveys character better than any game I've ever played. I love it to death.
Crash 4 is a fleshed out, wonderfully well-studied sequel. Built with a uniquely high grade of technical skill that is often diminished by design choices that can feel a little misguided. This is one of the most concrete building blocks I have ever played, and is one iteration away from complete perfection to my eyes. (Like... just make it so the checkpoint boxes tell you how many crates you missed. That would help SO MUCH). I'm hoping Toys For Bob continue pumping out wall to wall bangers now that Skylanders seems to have bitten the dust; they're more qualified than most to make gorgeous, satisfying and engaging platformers that are absolutely drenched in personality.