Pssst. It's really Crash Bandicoot 3 with confusing naming conventions.
Crash Bandicoot: Warped is my favorite Crash Bandicoot game, and the one I have the most fond memories of playing as a teen. We definitely spent more time playing Crash 2, as we got the 3rd game late in the life of the PS1, and by the time we had it the PS2 was coming out soon, and with it lovable technical juggernauts like Gran Turismo 3. So I had a fun few months playing this game with my friend, but never really got to spend the kind of time with it that I did with Crash 2.
It again follows the formula of Crash 2, with mostly 3D platforming levels, along with a few levels that use alternative genres. In this game, the new genres include dogfighting levels, a rail shooter (think Star Fox, only way goofier in a good way), jetski levels, motorcycle races, and riding a tiger (dope). You can play as Crash's sister Coco for the first time, although she appears exclusively in the vehicle style of levels.
Besides a new character and mix of genres, Crash 3 also introduces some new elements to the game. You can now unlock new abilities for Crash by beating bosses, including a double jump, a sprint, using your spin in the air like a helicopter to fly farther distances, shooting wumpa fruit from a giant bazooka, and a more powerful ground pound. These give the feeling of progress as you move throughout the game and are a nice touch.
There is also a new time trial mode, in which you can earn relics by completing the levels as fast as possible. Completing more of them unlocks secret levels as you advance, and doing these trials was actually a nice spin on the game, taking the focus of it more from a plodding, hunt for all of the boxes approach and giving you a different take that rewards risk taking and memorization.
Crash 3 sticks with the strengths of 2, while jettisoning some of the the weaknesses. The graphics are again superb, although they are more of a marginal improvement here than the improvement between 1 and 2. All of the textures and animations are very nice, and the 3D is clearer, reducing the confusion about where you are relative to objects, and decreasing some of the arbitrary and unfair difficulty of the second game.
The levels are again well designed, and very fun. All of the different genres do a nice job of breaking up the gameplay a bit, and give you slightly different flavors throughout the game.
The sound and music are very good, again.
While the bosses in 1 and 2 were weaknesses, in this game they are strengths! The bosses have clearly identifiable patterns to them, and feel challenging and rewarding to beat. The challenge here, unlike in 1 and 2, isn't to try absolutely everything until you find out what hurts the boss. Learning the patterns and evading the attacks here feels more intuitive, and less like monkeys banging on typewriters to produce Shakespeare.
Speaking of intuition, Crash 3 is much better at moving the focus of the difficulty from iteration to intuition than was Crash 2, which was itself much better than Crash 1. It finally feels like the difficulty has hit its sweet spot here, though, and struck the balance it should have had all along. There are far fewer "gotta remember that BS next time" moments, and the game is more enjoyable as a result.
I felt like the powerups that you got after the bosses were fun, but were underutilized. It would have been fantastic if certain parts of future levels required the use of the powerups to get through them, but this rarely was the case. This would have clearly communicated your growth as a hero, and caused excitement as you cleared sections of stages that would have been impossible before your heroic progression. The bonus levels actually do this really nicely, so I know it was possible, but I do think I could have gotten through every level without any powerups, which is a bummer. Speaking of powerups (tremendously mild spoiler alert), it was particularly dumb to leave the sprinting powerup until after the last boss, due to the fact that most of the time trials can only be accomplished using this powerup. This basically takes one of the more fun and creative parts of the game and walls it off in the end game, which seems like a mistake. It's not like having sprinting would break other parts of the game, so I'm really not sure why they did this.
Coco's inclusion was also a bit disappointing to me. Rather than be a selectable character with different attributes than Crash, she just rides on a tiger or in an airplane or on a jetski on those levels, and isn't available otherwise. I think going with a Mega Man/Zero style choice, with Coco having better speed and jumping, but being unable to spin for as long (or some other balancing choice) would have given the game a breath of fresh air that would have made it a real classic.
I think that despite its flaws, Crash Bandicoot: Warped is easily the best game in the Crash series. It polishes the strengths of Crash 2 and really improves some of the biggest weaknesses of what was a very good game to begin with. I'll give it a 9.1/10.
I swear to all that is holy that I am going to finish The Legend of Dragoon (I actually played some last night!) but I can't just play a console RPG in a dedicated fashion with nothing to break it up, so I'll also be playing a game that is completely new to me next for the home console part of this series. I will probably finish it before I finish the oldest thorn in my side (curse you, Dart!). Here's a teaser of a game so hard that I probably won't get to beat it, but I'm going to try my best and review it whether or not I can finish it. And I have very eagerly awaited plans for the next game after this, so be following along!
-TRO
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