Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex

I remember when I got a PS2 for Christmas, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex was the first game I played on it. Besides the long load times, it was pretty good. Of course, after I got a Gamecube 2 years or so later, I decided to buy it again, and I must say I was a bit... disappointed. Here's the lowdown on things...

GRAPHICS: 6/10 The biggest disappointment in this game is the graphics. For one, the frame rate is slower. This is most noticeable in the opening cinema, where the frame rate frequently drops significantly. It doesn't bring the game to a crawl, but for a Gamecube game, it's a real put-down, and it's a sure sign of laziness among animators. Another thing is the degraded graphics. Is that flat blue and white surface Crash is water-skiing on SUPPOSED to be water? Fans of Super Mario Sunshine will be angered. Also you can clearly see a large red ring around Uka Uka's red aura that shouldn't be there. Plus, the graphics overall are rough, and the polygons are few, and pretty noticeable.

SOUND: 4/10 Another disappointment is the sound; the volume of each character's voice seems completely random: they'll be completely normal at first, but then go down to a whisper for a few seconds, making it almost inaudible with the music drowning them out, but then the voices will go back to normal again. Don't even bother adjusting the volume on the TV; doing so will only get you broken eardrums the next moment. There's a problem with the sound effects too. They're often louder than any piece of dialouge in this game. In fact, on the first plane level in the game, there's this annoying, sourceless clunking noise (that clearly wasn't in the PS2 version) through the entire time you play that level, sucking out all the fun of shooting hapless victims out of the sky. Other than that, the sound effects are okay, but they can do better.

GAME-PLAY: 5/10 The game-play here is pretty much the exact same as the first 3 games in the series, without any twists or surprises, giving us the same boring valleys, corridors and tunnels all over again. They could at least have Crash talk this time, but it looks like that Traveller's Tales's philosophy when they were making this game was that "anything that's different from the usual Crash Bandicoot mold is sacrilege and blasphemy, and cannot be released to the public." A little bit of trivia: A concept that was announced during the production of the game was that they would put in special Elemental Crates that would appear if you re-enter a level. Activating the Crates would unlock a secret area, reveal a mini-boss, etc., but apparently, the idea was scrapped due to Traveller's Tales's little philosophy. I take points off the game-play for unoriginality.

OVERALL: 5/10 I recommend buying an Xbox, then buying Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex for Xbox. I hear that Crash actually has fur in that one. The Gamecube version is only worth a rental.

I was and I'm still am a huge fan of the original Crash Bandicoot series on the PS1. They were great, challenging games that never managed to be repetitive. I knew about this game beforehand, seen stills of it, some gameplay videos, and the cover looked very promising, since both Crash and Cortex are on it, both are crazy in their own manner: what more do you need? Well, a better game for sure. Is it that bad? Yes, and I'll explain why:

-The character design: it's not only different, but absolutely horrible. They look like bland, soulless plasticine puppets who are the originals' poor man's copy-paste work. Cortex looks arguably the worst. But it's OK...skip the cut-scenes, play the game, and realize: Crash moves differently as well. Why? Well, it might not be how he moves, it might be because of the design, but he unarguably looks different, when he runs and spins. "Different gen, different design, idiot" OK, then tell me why do I feel like the whole character's dynamism, which maybe could have single handedly give life to an original Crash game, if it didn't have fun characters, levels, humour and other great stuff, is completely gone? He runs and spins like he doesn't want to do all this. Why should I go fight Cortex for the sixth-billion time? Why should I spin at enemies, when I can just go home and chill, do I care about all this stuff? No, he doesn't. The Crash character was definitely re-designed by one of the creators who had the same attitude towards the game he was programming, and put his personal feelings into the character.

-The levels: I can imagine the programmers' boss: "Ok, we are done with the game, we just need some levels there. Anyone to do the levels? Matt, could you do the levels, please? Just do the levels please, and then you can go home. Just try to do something that looks like the original games. But please put no effort into it. What? Oh yeah they were some snowy levels in the second game, just put some snow on the levels. What you have an idea of a Mine Cart level? Yeah, it probably gets boring after a while. When it happens make him jump out of a cart, and put that half-level after it, that you put in the Recycle Bin yesterday and you're done for today" I hope you understand how much passion they put into the game. The level I mentioned is actually an existing level in the game: you start off in a mine-cart (on which you can only lean left and right, there was maybe time to add a jumping and crouching option, but since there was no time, or no care whatsoever, about making obstacles or boxes, there was no need for it). After a while it gets boring, but it still goes on for like a minute (which is believe me a lot when playing a game as boring and uninteresting as this) then Crash jumps out of the cart, and you land into a......some kind of factory....or like a....something maybe related to Cortex, maybe not......who cares, just run, go forward....but hey I'm astonished by how detailed is the design of this whole levels, oh no wait they are just bland, grey walls. I always remember with a smile the Egyptian levels , the "fantasy" levels , the sewer levels. They were all very well-thought out and specific. The creators back then had something very precise in their mind, and they just made it, and gave the best out the each level. It was never boring due the dynamism, the funny enemies and details, the challenging level-design (Tomb Wader in Warped for example: went on for hours, and still never got bored even if many times frustrated). In Wrath of Cortex, the levels have no soul, and frankly I can't make a difference between any of them! It's all the same, just some background stuff, to have a level, otherwise it's an unfinished game.

The humour: something the creators clearly didn't have. The original games used tons of clichés, but used it impeccably. Killer bees, frogs that turn into prince, evil wizards and so on. They even put twists one them sometimes: a pharaoh with a flamethrower for example, hilarious. Not that I'd pause the game, and laugh for hours, but they were little jokes, that were present in each levels and it played an important role in giving the game a soul. The creators here, they have no sense of humour...a medieval castle? Let's have a dragon! Oh these tall thin Cortex henchmen guys, they were funny looking....but what should they do? Oh just .......just make them stand there and shoot.....like..........i don't know things.

-The bosses: the story, which I frankly don't care about, because it doesn't have seem to have anything interesting in it, has something to do with...like masks, corresponding each to one of the fifth elements. And like...who cares? The bosses are like....big....scary.....things each representing one of these elements. OK, why did N-Gin, Dingodile, N-Tropy and the others go on a strike the same day? The bosses are extremely boring. I don't want to go into details, it's just boring, uninteresting and far from the feeling of the epic boss battles that were set in the earlier games. Except for the last boss...Cortex! Finally we are going again against this crazy maniac ..... oh no it's that Bandicoot clone Crunch and Cortex is there but he's like... Oh, whatever.

I could go on, but it all comes down to what I've been trying to explain and convey with these points: the game has lost the dynamism, the fun, the humour, the feeling and basically its whole soul with this episode. It LOOKS like a good Crash game, but when you play you'll probably be deceived.

In the days of the original Playstation, Crash Bandicoot was an unofficial mascot for the machine. Indeed, the three 2D/3D platform games he was in were of the highest quality. The transition to the Playstation 2 was successful, but not instantly so, as this game demonstrates.

Wrath of Cortex reminds me of a lot of big budget follow-ups, such as the new Star Wars films, in that it's great to look at and listen to, but it has very little else to recommend it. The story concerns Cortex creating a new evil bandicoot and using the four elemental masks to power it. This means you must gather all the crystals to stop him, facing the villainous bandicoot Crunch and one of the masks every five levels. The graphics and music in this game are what make it really worth playing, especially as Coco is now playable in platform levels for the first time. Unfortunately, the collision detection is erratic, the camera angles often make simple jumps a total chore and there's nothing much here that hasn't been done before. It's more like 'The Best of Crash' than a new game in its own right. Though Cortex's vocals are as witty as ever, the new villains are uninteresting. The masks in particular lack the individual characters of the bosses in 'Warped' and just seem like loud oafs. The long between-level loading screens are also a pain. You seem to spend half your time watching Crash floating in a giant bottle of Tizer.

To sum up, if you'e looking for a PS2 follow-up to the PS1 Crash plat-formers then you'd be better off with the far superior 'Twinsanity'.

Crash Bandicoot 4, the wrath of Cortex, is a game ported for playstation 2, Gamecube and XBOX, released in 2001, by traveler's tales. The first factor that stands out in this game is the generation gap, for obvious reasons. However, that does not take away from the game its problems with the quality of the graphics... This point is based on the character designs, because these are really bad... However, I must say that the scenarios look really good.

Let's go with the gameplay. Crash Bandicoot 4 has a huge variety of levels. I know this may sound positive, and in part it is. The problem with these levels is mainly the controls. The levels that present these problems are those of water. Except for that, most of the levels are enjoyable, especially the ball ones.

The last point I want to expose is the musical section... And it's great! Many people have problems with this, and I understand why, which is why this point is based on my opinion. This game provides us with electronic music, which makes sense when seeing what time it was released.

Conclusion: This game is highly underrated by critics. The problems that I can see are its OBVIOUS inspiration to Crash Bandicoot 3, the character design and the aquatic levels. Therefore, this one gets an 8/10. Thank you for taking the time to read to the end.

My next Movie/Game review after a more underappriated title, "Doogal".

This Crash Bandicoot Gameis barely OK. I rarely liked some of the games like: CTR: Crash team Racing, Crash Nitor Kart, & Crash Twinsanity There are a LOT of bad and Boring movies like Shark Tale, Disney/Pixar's Cars, & I am Sam. As a Crash Bandicoot fan.I think that they should keep up with more games that should have everything right like the ones I like. This Game will get a C. Here the results: Voice-acting: E 3.0/10.0 Garbage. Gets my ears a Head-ache.

Animation: D 4.0/10.0 Low-quatily Drawn. Could have fixed it up a bit.

Graphics: C-- 5.0/10.0 Mediocre. It's barely better then the Animation.

Dialouge: D+ 4.9/10.0 Poor plot and script.

Lasting Appeal: C+ 6.8/10.0 Can be fun for some people.

Overall: C 6.4/10.0 They could have made it less stupid and better but this is however it's one of my favorite video gamesand, but the changes are not worth my cup of tea like i said before. That's the end of my review. Good Night Everybody!