| Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath Of Cortex The latest instalment in the much celebrated Bandicoot series is available in your stores today. This is now the sixth episode in which our all-time favorite marsupial stars. The first Crash (on psone) was absolutely brilliant and the series became better and better the more Naughty Dog learned all of psone's secrets. The third one (CB: Warped) was the finest yet. Then came a small downhill when the developer's created CTR and Crash Bash. But despite those, it can be said that Crash is psone's mascotte. Then came The Wrath Of Cortex, a PS2 game developed by Trvaeller's Tales instead of Naughty Dog. Does this shift give Crash the ability to move on after CB:W or is it a step in the wrong direction? Well, to tell the truth, The shift didn't do anything. Crash never moved forward and never backwards. This instalment can simply be described as CB: Warped with better graphics. Traveller's Tales told to themselves: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' In some cases this works (e.g. Resident Evil series), but this Crash is as unoriginal as your granny making you cookies. In terms of gameplay, it's great. Breaking crates, killing little-suspecting bugs, kicking the crap out of donkeys before they crap on you is superb, the only thing that bothered me is that it's all been done before. Crash 3 offers the same, no better no worse. The enemies are the same, back are the wizards, dudes with bottles, fire guys from the egyptian levels and more, only five enemies or so are new (donkeys, cave-men, cacti). Even the levels where you are in a futuristic ball look original at first, but all you're playing are the other levels all over again. When you move Crash, you have to wait for about half a second and when you have to jump at the last minute, you're dead, either you jump into the nitro or jump on it. Another thing is the draw-distane, T-Tales has done a sh*tty job. When you jump over a gap, you don't know where the gap ends and you push the back-button and you fall in the hole, too bad, you have to start over. This brings me to another problem: the levels are too long and checkpoints too far apart. Every level has got only about 2 or 3. And in levels where different gameplay submerges, this can be annoying, e.g. one minute you're underwater in your diving-suite, then in a specially designed underwater machine and then above water where twistering needs to be done. Another thing that bugged me were those dreadful long loading screens, the front in which it's written is just childish and this was for me the first sign that said: same stuff again. Simply said: gameplay is great, but if you've played any of the previous, it's very repetititous. Graphics are far superiour then Crash 3. Bandicoot and co are well crafted, but doesn't push PS2 to its limits, they are below average. The backgrounds look great, but don't interact with the rest of the level, this makes that when you jump up a small wall, you hit air. I just have to say, that it's the same (again). Crash 3's graphics have a special feel about them, TWOC tries to create the same feel, but fails to do this. PS2's graphic ailities are too superiour to make great Crash graphics. As for the sound department, I'm just gonna repeat what I've already said a couple of times: it's the same. T-Tales copied the soundtrack from Crash 3 and added some extras which, I must say, are making me nervous, There's a level where you are in the ball and the sound makes me nauseous, physically nauseous. The sound varies from a soft bling bling sound to highly pomped-up bling bling sound. There's nothing more to say about this field, but I can say one thing: The sound is great, if you haven't played something like this before. Page 2 |