Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is pretty much an improvement over the original in almost every single way.

The level designs and aesthetics are more varied and fun, providing the player with a good challenge, but I believe levels never become quite as hard as Crash 1, which allows this game to be more beginner-friendly, in my opinion.

Crash now has a new move, that being the slide! Doing a slide jump in this game is very satisfying, especially when you're trying to do longer jumps, or when you're just casually running through the stage!
Additionally, Crash also has the Belly Flop, which is performed by pressing the slide button after a jump, and I think it's fine. I found it useful for breaking my momentum in the middle of a jump, but I don't find it as reliable as something like the Stomp in the Boost Sonic games.

I think the bosses are a bit better than last time, not by much, but they are fun to fight, as simple as they may be.
Additionally, there's a bit more story this time around.
I didn't really discuss this during my Crash 1 review, but the plot of last time was that Crash was a failed experiment by Dr. Neo Cortex, and that he escaped the lab, but his girlfriend Tawna, is still stuck in there, and Crash has got to save her from Cortex and stop him from taking over the world with his army of animal experiments.
This time around, Tawna is nowhere to be seen (I wonder why) and Crash has a younger sister named Coco. She doesn't do much in the story, mainly just trying to warn Crash of Cortex's actual plan, which is pretty obvious to see, but considering that Crash is a big dumbass... yeah. Cortex is using Crash to get all crystals, the plot McGuffin of this game, to power up the Cortex Vortex and rule over the world!

The biggest glow-up, I'd say, has got to be the voice acting. Now, in the original game, voice acting was minimal and we didn't hear many characters talking, but when they did... it was meh. Nothing bad per say, but nothing really good either.
This time around, there are more cutscenes, and we hear more of Dr. Cortex, this time being voiced by Clancy Brown, and I love how much character he gives to the mad scientist, it's great!

And that also applies to the game's overall presentation, as the graphics look slighty better, especially Crash's model, and the music is more catchy than the original. Not all of it is memorable, but there are some pretty good tracks in here.

This time around, I actually decided to go for 100% completion, being the first time I ever 100%'d a Crash game, and while it is generally a better experience than the original, but not having to worry about dying, there's probably way more backtracking here than last time.
Now, Crash 1 had its backtracking moments, especially with the colored gems, but this time around, not only can you get a gem by breaking all of the boxes, but also by doing something different, and this is where the Death Routes come into play!

Not all stages have a Death Route, and not all secondary gems require you do a Death Route, but a Death Route is an alternate route of a stage that you get by not dying up to that point. The thing is, a good chunk of stages that have Death Route have boxes in said route and in the main route, which requires a bunch of backtracking and fighting against the game's locked camera to break every box in the stage and get one of the gems.

While this game is an improvement over the original in many aspects, this was the pits, and not really that fun.
But I will admit, I did smile when I finally got 100% completion, especially because it was my first time doing so.

Overall, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is a great sequel to the original, improving on a lot, but still has a couple of snags holding it back from being the best it could be.

One of the best third person shooters ever, but at the cost of the more interesting level design and art direction of its predecessors.

This game's development was rather troubled and it shows. Some levels feel hastily slapped together and some of them are just repurposed multiplayer maps. The multiplayer slapped, actually, but sadly it's now dead as a doornail, and I seriously wish the series did more with it after Deadlocked. Fortunately the series' signature strafe-shooting and frantic somersaulting is as good as ever and carries the game really hard.

Though it lacks the highs of some of the other games, it's still a fairly consistent experience overall. It's just absent some of the interesting features of other entries in the series such as platforming gauntlets and branching levels to explore. I still rate it as one of the best Ratchet & Clank games just because what's there is a ton of fun, and though it's less satirical than its predecessors and immediate sequel, it's still one of the funniest games in the series. And David Bergeaud's music still goes just as hard.

I almost can't forgive this game for creating Dr Nefarious, who I consider a plague on the series because he's had every last drop of mildly amusing humour and villainous charisma squeezed out of him and continued to be milked for several more games after he ran dry of entertainment value. But it wouldn't be fair of me to take points away from this game for introducing him, as he was a reasonably entertaining villain in this game and he hadn't yet been milked to death and then some.

Growing up, this was one of the only games I had to play on my FAT PlayStation 2. I bought it for 6 dollars pre-owned at a GameStop because I begged my mom for a new game so I could stop playing Nicktoons Unite!

I remember having so much fun playing this game. I played it over and over I think I fucked up the game disc because of it. It might've been the best thing I've ever experienced up until that point in my life. Back then, it was awesome.

Now that I'm grown up, I realize. This game fucking blows. I've tried replaying this game on five separate occasions over the years, and nowadays I keep dropping it around halfway through Team Sonic's campaign because this game is mindless and, honestly, really boring as it goes on.

I don't mind the controls for the game; after playing it extensively, I've grown accustomed to them, and it feels like second nature. In this game, it feels like you have to be super careful so as not to have the game freak out on you, like in Mystic Mansion or Rail Canyon. Sometimes mistakes don't even feel like your fault, and it's just the game shitting itself for no reason. I don't think I should shit my pants trying to position myself correctly so the lightspeed dash doesn't fuck up for no reason, and the Rocket Accel being inconsistent is annoying too. I will say, though, that when you get the right momentum with the game, it can be a blast, especially during the earlier levels.

You can tell Iizuka was struggling with designing the levels towards the end of the game because they just turn into repeated platforming and combat set pieces, and it gets more apparent towards the end of the game. I'm not shitting on Iizuka; I believe he did the best with what he could, and not a lot of people would do what he did in his position, so I respect him a lot for his work here.

Iizuka aside, I don't feel as if this game has content good enough to justify four repeated playthroughs (I'm aware of how different Team Rose/Chaotix's levels are, and I still don't like them). It's kind of a shame, though, because I think this game has very good environmental design and art direction that makes all levels stand out in amazing ways, but the level design itself is nothing to write home about past Power Plant.

Bosses are either too easy or just a chore to sit through. Egg Hawk is embarrassingly easy, and Team battles are mind-numbingly broken. BUT, they're at least better than Robot Carnival/Robot Storm which just feel like they waste time and do nothing interesting except spawn waves of enemies over and over. The final boss is... okay I guess. playing as all teams is a neat idea but they all play the same and the super sonic portion is a nice spectacle fight but that's all it really is to me. Spectacle.

If this game didn't force you to play the same 14 levels and boring/annoying boss fights four times, then I wouldn't be so hard on it, but I can only take so many of the same levels, Robot Carnivals, and bad level design before I turn the game off and play something better.

If I had to pick a favorite team, though, it would be Team Dark. Their campaign has the best balance of challenge and platforming that I like out of all the playthroughs.

A game flooded and rupturing with so much ambition, so many ideas (even with so many barely explored), and such a fascinating, evasive legacy that its incompleteness only creates infinite depth. Xenogears is the oddly-shaped kernel of a still-expanding universe, a beating, bleeding heart of a story that wears its many influences plainly and proudly while still feeling unsettlingly different from any of its peers. There’s so much more that could be here, that is here, that is instead in Perfect Works and Xenosaga and Xenoblade and in everything that’s taken inspiration from it since. I’m obsessed with Xenogears. I think I will be for a long time.

The R&C train continues as I move right onto the sequel. It's still a very recognizable game from the first, but this game has a TON of small but super significant improvements over the original, so I was pretty immediately drawn in. It took me around 12 hours to finish the Japanese version of the game while only getting a couple collectibles.

In this game, Ratchet & Clank find themselves where they ended the first game: watching TV at home. When suddenly, an eccentric inventor from another galaxy transports them to his location and tells them he needs their help to recover his stolen Protopet! After 2 weeks of commando training (off screen), Ratchet and Clank set off to save this missing Protopet and figure out just who the real bad guys may be. The story is certainly better and more involved than the first, but its overall presentation is still pretty similar. Most characters just amount to being little more than quirky item vendors you meet only one time, but it's still entertaining, and the overall resolution to the story is fun. Ratchet & Clank's banter is still fun as ever and it's a pleasing overlay to the platforming action of the main gameplay.

The main gameplay is very similar to the first game, but with many improvements. It's still a series of planets with a few branching paths in each. You kill enemies to get money to buy weapons to keep going through those planets to find more tools and guns and navigation data to new levels. Just how much better this game plays than the first game cannot be overstated, though. You can FINALLY strafe! In a third-person shooting game, this helps the combat out MASSIVELY, as you can probably easily imagine. On top of that, Ratchet also moves way less clumsily than he does in the first game, and his jumping and walking are tighter overall. Checkpoints are more frequent as well as actually being told to you when they happen, there are far less annoying and awful minigames (although there are still a couple), and ammo boxes actually respawn now between deaths so ammo is far less of a worry.

The guns are also better across the board, with nearly all of them being far more generally useful rather than the more circumstantial-to-useless feeling so many guns in the first game had. They also level up as you use them, going from normal to upgraded, and helping your favorite guns stay more relevant through more of the game. Ratchet himself also has an XP bar of sorts now, as killing more enemies will eventually trigger you to gain a new quarter of a life container (they're basically like hearts in Zelda), so you end up dying a LOT less even though the game's enemies do hit harder as you progress through the story. This game, like the first, still has an issue with some super weapons and armor (which reduces the amount of damage you take across the board by a percentage) being HORRIFICALLY expensive and requiring hours and hours of grinding for cash to acquire. A lot of the normal guns and armor are also quite prohibitively expensive, but the game really doesn't expect you to collect them all on your first playthrough (given that the game has a new game+ mode of sorts).

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a radical improvement from the first game in just about every way. It plays so much better I was actually happy to chase some of the more silly in-game side quests, like collecting every crystal and moon stone, simply because I was having so much fun with the combat. It's not quite perfect, but it's held up damn well and is still very worth playing so many years after its release.

A spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie made by the original Rareware devs that fails to capture the magic and fails to listen to nearly 2 decades of criticisms.

Go check out all my reviews of DK64, Banjo-Tooie(N64), and Banjo-Kazooie Nuts n Bolts. To get the full story. I try not to review games I never beat but I'm telling a story and I had enough time with the game to make a fair judgement.

Nine years have past from Nuts n Bolts. Rare devs left because they were put in Kinnect jail for so long after it. They made their own studio. Their first project is to make a collectathon of old. Made by the kings of collectathons. Great idea right?

Sadly, the culmination of this is a failure. Why is that though? First off, the worlds are empty. They are too big. Sound familiar. Nearly 20 years, since DK64, a major complaint was your worlds are too big. Here we are. at the end of this story. They never learned. They even doubled down and added a mechanic that expanses the worlds making them even larger and emptier. This is just one of the flaws though.

The pagies(the jiggy equivalent), are no longer just, platform to them. Most of the time they are locked behind a challenge. In BK1 and 2 although there are jiggies locked behind challenges like races most are still simply platform to them or solve a puzzle with a move. This just isn't the case in Yooka-Laylee.

Let's talk about this game's version of the Talon Trot. The Talon Trot being a movement upgrade. It allows you to go up hills but also run. Super helpful move. Most of the time in BK you are using this move to run around worlds. Yooka-Laylee has a similar move. Except it sucks. It's hard to control. Yooka rolls up unto a ball while Laylee balances on him and they speed away. Great in theory. Sadly no one likes rolling on a ball as a mechanic. It's hard to control. It's hard to stay still. It's hard to adjust. It feels terrible. Traversing the world that is already too big with a bad traversal move.

Let's take about these challenges to get pagies. There is not a lot of variety here. What variety there is, gets old.

Another mechanic they made that was infuriating is for some reason there are stamina bars. And during races, one of the most used challenges in the game, you got to use the terrible Talon Trot equivalent rolling move plus deal with an unneeded stamina mechanic. How do you fill your stamina? With butterflies that are impossible to see while you are zooming around with bad controls during races. It's bad design all around. There was no need for a stamina bar.

Let's talk about the worlds. They are bland. They are sparse and void of life. And this is before expanded the world. It gets worse after that. There is so much dead space without anything meaningful there. No collectable, no NPC, no consumables, nothing. They never learned bigger isn't better. Despite nearly 2 decades of being told, that bigger isn't better. Most of the theming in the worlds are bland too. Although, the casino level is neat.

People complained about the voices being annoying. What did you expect? The Banjo voices aren't annoying yet these are? I think that was people just looking for more reasons to complain IMO. The voices are just fine.

Yet again, another complaint people had was about the quizzes. It's a Banjo spiritual successor. What did you expect? Of course there are going to be quizzes just like BK 1, 2 and Nuts n Bolts. Yet again people finding other reasons to complain despite having plenty of real things to complaint about.

You were sold on this being a successor to Banjo. The voices and quizzes are part of Banjo whether you like it or not. The quizzes are not even hard. They are mostly things you should already know. I'm sorry, but those complaints are people looking for things. They knew what they were buying into. It was sold on being Banjo.

Side note: I never beat the game, but the final boss looks like a nightmare from what I remember. So that is keeping in line with BK1. HAH!

Character design is great. I really like the duck, Dr Quack. They all have their charm. Yooka is clearly high and Laylee is mean. A bit meaner than Kazooie tbh. Sometimes unlikeable mean. But she is still charming. The humor is typical Rare humor.

So here we are, the end of this journey. A journey of me ripping into Rare and Playtonic. By no means are any of these bad games. I really just wanted to paint a picture of why things are the way they are. Why the collectathon kings fell out of the good graces with their fans. And why I personally, don't want them touching Banjo again. I don't trust them to. Somewhere along the line, they forgot what made Banjo good. It's just disappointing.

But let's end this on a good note. Yooka-Laylee has a sequel. It is a spiritual successor to Donkey Kong Country. And they did an amazing job with it. So maybe there is hope for Playtonic.