Game details Developer: Vicarious Visions

Publisher: Activision

Platform: PS4

Release Date: June 30, 2017

ESRB Rating: E for Everyone

Price: $40 / £35

Links: PlayStation Store (UK) Vicarious Visions: Activision: PS4June 30, 2017E for Everyone: $40 / £35

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy gets about as much right as a game trilogy of this scope possibly could. A few uneven and unoptimized classic-game remasters have been pumped out in recent years, and I'm happy to report that the Crash series' handlers at Activision have not dropped the ball in any Activision-y way, beyond a current lock on PlayStation 4 systems. No pre-order restrictions; no microtransactions; not even corner-cutting on the game's production.

N. Sane Trilogy lands this week with a lot of apparent love and care. It also lands with the same baggage that made Crash such a divisive platformer series in the '90s. While that makes N. Sane Trilogy a tough game to unequivocally recommend, it also feels like the only way this collection could have come out. Developer Vicarious Visions chose authenticity over improvement, and, in the sphere of gaming history and archival, that choice matters.

Looney Tunes charisma is intact













As I learned in a June interview with Vicarious Visions' producers, this Crash Bandicoot anthology is a tricky one to describe. N. Sane Trilogy is not a "remake," since the three games' levels and general designs have been left mostly intact, but it's not a "remaster," since most of the content had to be rebuilt and re-rendered from scratch. Hard drives were lost; codebases and assets didn't transfer. Series creators Naughty Dog did serious, pioneering work to get the original Crash games to look the way they did on PlayStation 1 consoles, and those code tricks don't translate to modern CPU/GPU combos, either.

This PlayStation 4 game boots with all three games selectable from the get-go (if you buy the 23GB digital version, it will download Crash 1 first). They all demand more-or-less the same thing from players: run from the start of a 3D level to its finish, while breaking boxes and looking for secrets along the way.

The originals did a remarkable job pushing the PlayStation 1 to its limits, and while the same can't exactly be said for the N. Sane Trilogy, it flexes far more visual muscle than I expected. Texture work ranks right up there with the clean, colorful stylings of Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, and level geometry has been fleshed out to look like a modern PS4 game.

Meanwhile, lighting, shadow, weather, foliage, blur, and fur effects see the PlayStation 4's GPU cranked pretty highly. The updated animations and rendering slapped onto Crash and his sister Coco are full of Looney Tunes charisma, and it's easy to mistake some of their zoomed-in sequences as pre-rendered cinema content.

Conversely, N. Sane is still a PS1 game at heart, so CPU operations are simple and view distances are minimized (although Vicarious has at least dropped the viewing angle slightly for an improved perspective). That makes the game's 30 fps refresh a little harder to swallow. Vicarious should be proud of how much some of the game's scenes look pre-rendered, and the frame rate appears to have an ironclad lock at 30Hz (which, gaming historians will point out, makes this identical to the PS1 original).

But control latency is key for a tough-as-nails '90s platformer, and, in the PS1 era, most gamers had the benefit of a CRT screen. Modern players are already losing a few milliseconds to their TV sets, and the worst part of the Crash Bandicoot trilogy—its gerdanged pixel-perfect jumps—are harder to swallow with the apparent extra lag that comes from a combination of a 30 fps refresh, the DualShock 4 Bluetooth controller, and any HDTV lag. (I tested N. Sane on the same rig I use to play the likes of Mega Man 2, if you're wondering about my platforming bias.)

Pseudo-3D that actually aged pretty well

Crash is not a bad platforming series by any stretch, especially compared to its '90s peers. Its mix of top-down, from-behind, and from-ahead perspectives afforded series creators Naughty Dog some clever tricks in building solid run-and-jump-and-dash content. It's fair to say that Crash picked up where Sonic's 2D heyday left off—not as fast, of course, but there's definitely a strong "bash and spin through levels for top speed" element to the level designs. Plus, most other platformer series at the time had no idea how to make anywhere near as competent a jump to 3D.

One reason is that Crash was a clever series. It was nowhere near a full-fledged 3D platformer, and Naughty Dog made sure of that by locking its perspective. The developers built Crash on a foundation of tried-and-true 2D platformer principles, and it tweaked those with more "lanes" of movement afforded by fully 3D rendering.

The most glaring problem for this remaster is that Naughty Dog didn't employ one of the Mario series' best lessons: use a great, new idea once, then throw it in the trash. Crash Bandicoot 1, 2, and 3 rely heavily on rehashed levels that have players return, again and again, to the same gimmick or twist with only slight changes or jumps in difficulty. Running away from a boulder was a blast at first! But not the sixth time.

This is made all the more annoying by the series' seemingly random hidden-item and secret-exit placement, which might be more tolerable if Crash didn't insta-die whenever he falls into a pit or bumps into an enemy while unguarded. You're likely to do both of those things while pressing against level edges or jumping toward seemingly secret-lined paths. You'll run into friction either way: focus on the secrets, and repetitive levels take that much longer to beat. Ignore the secrets, and you miss some of Naughty Dog's truly clever level twists.

Why can’t they just unlock everything in these?

Had N. Sane shipped with an "all levels unlocked" mode, as we at Ars have begged game-remaster teams to do, I might have sung a different tune. Naughty Dog spread enough clever, fun, colorful, and time trial-worthy levels across the first three Crash games to be worth a full-length game. Vicarious should have created a first-timer's "playlist" of these levels in N. Sane Trilogy to ward off that feeling of repetition and emphasize the full series' variety.

Instead, the best players can do is skip the first game—which Crash 2 handily outdid, and Crash 3 expanded upon to decent effect (though with a few too many "ride this helpful creature" levels for my tastes). N. Sane is still a solid collection, and all levels benefit from a rebuilt time-trial system that doles out time bonuses for players who find and bust open the correct crates. I've enjoyed chasing lower completion times while marveling at the remake's top-notch cartoony stylings.

However, my mind hasn't been changed about some of the series' more pedestrian platforming challenges, which I find are padded by pixel-perfect jumps and obnoxious "one wrong move and you gotta redo a full minute of jumping" moments. If you skipped Crash in the '90s and think you're in for a real nostalgic treat, be warned. Very warned.

On the other hand, right now, for both the cost and the amount of content in here, I cannot think of a better PlayStation-exclusive platformer to give to a kid—especially the kind of kid who doesn't mind studying FAQs and secret-items guides to get to the 100-percent mark. The slick design will trick them into playing through a real platforming-genre history lesson, and what parent doesn't like to sneak some education into their kids' entertainment?

The good

You're getting your money's worth in terms of old content brought back to life

Very slight tweaks to item layouts, but otherwise, the trilogy has returned in faithful fashion

Vicarious pushes the PS4 hard to deliver what looks like a pre-rendered animated cartoon

Robust time-trial system adds a welcome competitive edge to older levels

The bad

The trilogy's reliance on repetitive levels can get old fast

Lack of real tutorials or lead-in may annoy gamers who've gotten used to games that teach you as you go

A 30 fps lock makes issues like unresponsive controls and input lag that much more obvious

An unlocked "just play these levels" playlist would have been welcome

The ugly

At launch, loading times are far longer than on the PS1 originals

Verdict: Your Crash bias will be reinforced, either way, by this mostly top-notch return to the originals.