I think it is necessary to mention before anything else that I've never played the original PlayStation games, but I am somewhat familiar with the mechanics and changes made to them in this remaster (thank you Caddicarus, go check out his Youtube channel, it's great.)
These original PlayStation games were released from 1996 to 1998, and, for games that are all over 20 years old, I found that they've all aged surprisingly well. Yes, I'm sure that some changes were made to the original design, such as some camera angles and hitboxes, but just speaking in terms of the gameplay mechanics, Crash has to be one of the best aged platformers of the early 3D era.
This is undoubtedly because they're all relatively simple games, although they get more mechanically complex as the trilogy continues. Crash 1 has a grand total of three commands in the gameplay - move, jump, and attack, and that's pretty much it. The story can be summed up in about two sentences: Bad guy mutates Crash and loses control of the experiment, and kidnaps his girlfriend. You then go to rescue her. That's it. And yet, the animations are fantastic, the soundtrack is great, and for such a simple set of gameplay commands, the level design gets so much good use out of them that even 24 years later, it's still so much fun to play. The changes to the gem system from the game's original release is so welcome, and makes it so much less needlessly punishing.
However, for as much fun as the game is, certain levels are royal pains in the neck, nearly all the bosses are just terrible, there are occasionally some issues with the camera, and the time trials added to this remaster are obviously not designed around the levels that were not originally built to be speedran.
As for Crash 2, while it might sound stupid to criticise the story in a game that clearly doesn't have it as the focus, it could have been so much better if the opening cutscene straight up was not in the game, as it could have built up a genuine mystery and kept you guessing until the very end...but I am slightly nitpicking here. This one was my favourite of the trilogy, it has so many memorable and fun levels, and this time around there are incredibly well designed secrets to find, more variety in the levels, and the new death routes and ways of doing the bonus levels gets a big thumbs up from me. Some of the bosses are considerably better than their equivalents in Crash 1, and others are equally as awful, but nevertheless it is an overall improvement. I don't really have much to say about this one, so we'll move on...
...to Crash 3: Warped. This one has by far the most variety in the level design of all these games, but unfortunately I find that with the most variety, comes the most flaws. Some of the level types such as the flying and underwater levels are just boring and not fun, and the secrets this time around are far too cryptic to be reasonably figured out. However, the rest of the levels are easily some of the best in the series, the new powerup system is so much fun to mess around with, and Coco levels like the jet ski and tiger sequences are a very welcome addition.
Other than the slight changes and additions with every succeeding game, the gameplay of all three games is virtually identical, and really fun. Perhaps they would have been a little more complex if they were made further into the 3D era, but for what they are, this is an amazing little package, and as far as the actual remaster goes, it looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, and controls beautifully, and with Crash 4 on the way, you couldn't pick a better time to give this one a look.
