To be succinctly blunt, I don't get the appeal here. I like platformers, 2D or 3D, linear or open, but this did so little for me, only getting positive marks because I found the platinum relic process rather rewarding overall.
I can't say I care for Crash as a character. He's a wacky Taz-like mascot who I've always sorta tolerated. He's a bit too zany for me, very little to latch onto. Besides Neo Cortex, I can't say I connect with anything in Crash's world. It's all 'fine', but partially why I struggled to enjoy aspects of these games that I may like in a Mario or even Spyro. These are the least of the game's issues, though.
What breaks this game for me is just how dull most of the levels are. So many hazards are just tedious to work around, forcing you to constantly wait for the right cycles before you can progress. This makes almost every level a bit of a slog, with so few obstacles requiring unique approaches. The more interesting levels, such as the lights out ones, are pretty bad. The lights in those levels aren't interesting, you can see until you get hit and there's nothing beyond that. Your field of view is as good as any other level when you have lights but as soon as they're gone, you may as well throw yourself into the nearest pit because you're unlikely to make it through otherwise!
Then there's the 100% goals. I got 105% (well, 104% because the game decided to glitch on me) which means collecting all of the box gems and time trial relics (I got all of the platinums, though I don't think this is required for 105%). The box gems were rather uninteresting, very few boxes are well hidden, with only a couple I couldn't find on my own because they were placed in completely insane locations. The painful part of these is that you can't even get some box gems on your first run through a level, requiring you to find a coloured gem later in the game before returning and completely a new route. I'm not a fan of this kind of backtracking; you're not revisiting levels with new abilities, the game is just gating you arbitrarily, with no ryme or reason to why these needed to be something you couldn't do the first time around.
And then we have the platinum relics. Many of these were incredibly easy, taking 5-10 minutes at most to grab. This included The High Road, a level which I'd heard horror stories about yet turned out to be a breeze. The only challenge in levels like this are to do with awkward depth perception, frame tight jumps and awful, awful hitboxes. On the other end of the spectrum you have levels like The Lab and Stormy Ascent, which were absolutely miserable to speed through. What makes these levels abhorrent to speedrun is how much it relies on good cycles on the obstacles to beat them quickly. You often have to wait a few seconds at the start to time things correctly, and often you'll be making jumps with almost no room for error. I would clash with these terrible hitboxes constantly, The Lab was the worst offender of this. You either had to wait for the electric gates to clear, time it perfectly so that they're not in your way or make pixel perfect jumps over the top, which I found near impossible to perform consistently. It was infuriating, and while I generally only found the game enjoyable when it was a challenge, it would usually go too far and become egregious.
There was some fun to be had here, but not much. I was glad to finally see my save file with105% 104%, but I'm not sure it was worth the effort. Maybe the other games will be better? I'm not certain.
I can't say I care for Crash as a character. He's a wacky Taz-like mascot who I've always sorta tolerated. He's a bit too zany for me, very little to latch onto. Besides Neo Cortex, I can't say I connect with anything in Crash's world. It's all 'fine', but partially why I struggled to enjoy aspects of these games that I may like in a Mario or even Spyro. These are the least of the game's issues, though.
What breaks this game for me is just how dull most of the levels are. So many hazards are just tedious to work around, forcing you to constantly wait for the right cycles before you can progress. This makes almost every level a bit of a slog, with so few obstacles requiring unique approaches. The more interesting levels, such as the lights out ones, are pretty bad. The lights in those levels aren't interesting, you can see until you get hit and there's nothing beyond that. Your field of view is as good as any other level when you have lights but as soon as they're gone, you may as well throw yourself into the nearest pit because you're unlikely to make it through otherwise!
Then there's the 100% goals. I got 105% (well, 104% because the game decided to glitch on me) which means collecting all of the box gems and time trial relics (I got all of the platinums, though I don't think this is required for 105%). The box gems were rather uninteresting, very few boxes are well hidden, with only a couple I couldn't find on my own because they were placed in completely insane locations. The painful part of these is that you can't even get some box gems on your first run through a level, requiring you to find a coloured gem later in the game before returning and completely a new route. I'm not a fan of this kind of backtracking; you're not revisiting levels with new abilities, the game is just gating you arbitrarily, with no ryme or reason to why these needed to be something you couldn't do the first time around.
And then we have the platinum relics. Many of these were incredibly easy, taking 5-10 minutes at most to grab. This included The High Road, a level which I'd heard horror stories about yet turned out to be a breeze. The only challenge in levels like this are to do with awkward depth perception, frame tight jumps and awful, awful hitboxes. On the other end of the spectrum you have levels like The Lab and Stormy Ascent, which were absolutely miserable to speed through. What makes these levels abhorrent to speedrun is how much it relies on good cycles on the obstacles to beat them quickly. You often have to wait a few seconds at the start to time things correctly, and often you'll be making jumps with almost no room for error. I would clash with these terrible hitboxes constantly, The Lab was the worst offender of this. You either had to wait for the electric gates to clear, time it perfectly so that they're not in your way or make pixel perfect jumps over the top, which I found near impossible to perform consistently. It was infuriating, and while I generally only found the game enjoyable when it was a challenge, it would usually go too far and become egregious.
There was some fun to be had here, but not much. I was glad to finally see my save file with