Backlog Beatdown: Crashing into more Bandicoots with Crash Bandicoot 2

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is a game Kirsty bought as part of the N-Sane Trilogy when she first had the PS4. I play Crash every now and again, usually as some sort of intermission between long-form RPGs and open world games! Regular readers may remember I beat the first Crash Bandicoot nearly two years ago, and after coming back to Crash Bandicoot 2 I reached the end of that a few weeks ago. Here’s what I found:

Watch out for that plant...

Crash Bandicoot is abducted by Dr Neo Cortex and instructed to retrieve 25 crystals for him so that Cortex can harness their power to stop a cataclysm caused by an up-coming alignment of planets. Crash must traverse 25 levels in search of these crystals, and hand them over to Dr Cortex. However, all is not as it seems, as Crash’s sister Coco warns him against Cortex and his former assistant, Dr Nitrus Brio, contacts Crash with an alternate plan… which path will Crash choose?

The Mascot Platformer was declining in popularity during the mid-late 90s but given that Crash was flying that flag for Sony’s PlayStation, it shared a remarkable number of the same tropes as Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog. The groundwork was set in the first Crash game – the characters, the villains, the basic gameplay loop – and Crash 2 was more of the same but expanded upon in ways that made the game better. In addition to everything he could do in the previous game, Crash also acquired a power slide and crawl move, which came in useful for certain puzzling sections of the game. Late in the game, Crash acquires a jetpack, which is a little fiddly to use but shakes the gameplay up a bit. And the post-game content contributes to the end as well – the “alternate plan” I referenced earlier involves getting all the gems – much harder than the crystals – which affects how the game ends when you defeat the final level.

As a tribute to my Dad's recollection of a 
Monty Python sketch, I called these hedgehogs:
"Spiny Norman."

Most of the levels in Crash 2 are designed with the 2.5D sensibility that worked well for the Crash Bandicoot series at the time. You run from one side of the level to the other, smashing all the crates, spinning, or dodging the enemies, picking up the crystals – they’re always in the path of the level and are impossible to miss – and defeating the bosses once every five levels or so, which are quite a bit easier than the first game. The levels require some quite precise platforming, and while there’s nothing as irritating as the bridge levels from the first game, there are certain sections where jumping on platforms that are ahead of you require some trial and error! The levels where you ride an animal for extra speed make a welcome return, as do the levels where you’re running away from a much larger obstacle – a giant polar bear or rock! The latter are hard because you are running into the screen in this case, and it’s very difficult to see where you’re going. It wobbles on the line between satisfyingly challenging and frustratingly hard, so while getting to the end of the game is far from impossible, I find that Crash is better enjoyed in small bursts. Having reached the end of the game, I have no desire to go back and find all the gems – I haven’t got anywhere near as much investment in this as Spyro!

Keep Rollin' Rollin' Rollin' Rollin...

The game is presented well; the graphics are fine, and the sound is good. The voice acting is in line with the larger-than-life cartoon characters of the 90s and works as well as it needs to. The plot is a little thin – it is obvious that a “betrayal” twist is on its way – but that’s hardly the point of a Crash Bandicoot game!

I enjoy Crash Bandicoot as a distraction from longer and more serious games, as I described above. But the frustrating difficulty makes it hard to enjoy as much as some other games I’ve been playing. Crash 2 is definitely better than its predecessor, and remains a good game, but for me, never quite reaches the levels of being a great game. I’ve enjoyed it – but that’s all I did.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

Last Week's Games: Crash Bandicoot 2, 8-Bit Armies, Army of Two

Not 100% sure I've got the right game here...

As you might expect, on Christmas week there hasn’t been a massive amount of time for playing games. I managed to have a couple of goes with Crash Bandicoot 2: the Wrath of Cortex on the PlayStation 4, as part of the N-Sane trilogy. Some of you might remember I played through the original Crash Bandicoot over the summer, and I knew I was going to be busy, so I didn’t fancy picking up another long-form RPG I wasn’t going to have time to beat! Crash Bandicoot 2 was a typical sequel of its time; same as before, but slightly better. In this case Crash has a few new moves: A power slide, a crawl and a belly slam attack. He is on a quest to find a selection of crystals for Dr N. Cortex, the villain of the previous game; I’m only up to the third set of levels so far but I don’t get the feeling that this association is going to end well! I’m having a decent amount of fun with it so far and will probably see it through to the end, frustrating though the difficulty can very often be, but I doubt I will go for 100% completion.

An army in luminescent green, if you can believe that...

I also played a game on my laptop that I hadn’t played for a good couple of years: 8-Bit Armies. I played this game in 2017, got a few levels in to it and for some reason didn’t touch it again after that, which was a shame because it was pretty good, if a little basic in delivery. It’s a real-time strategy game with an 8-bit aesthetic, which basically translates to: “All the models have blocky textures.” Each level is fairly short and has its own gimmick and objective, which suits me fine as it means I don’t necessarily have to be playing the game for hours before I get to the next bit! I particularly enjoyed the level where the two bases are separated by an erupting volcano, which your infantry will find it very difficult to survive. I therefore had to attack the enemy base using nothing but tanks and armoured cars, and the game moves quickly enough that I could send multiple waves of units in sequence. I might see this game through to the end, I might not, but I’m even less likely to go back through the game and try to obtain all the achievement challenges for it; it’s good, but not that good!

Not that easy to tell Rios and Salem
apart once their masks are down.

Finally I got to the end of a game I started in 2015: Army of Two. I’ve had a bit of an on-off relationship with this particular game. I’m pretty sure the only reason I bought it was because at some point I’d downloaded one of its sequels onto my Xbox 360 as part of the Games with Gold scheme and wanted to play the games in sequence. It was a war shooter that I didn’t find particularly engaging at that point in my life, and when a lot of things changed for me in a very short space of time, I wasn’t inclined to return to it. Then, over last summer, I thought I’d give it another go. I got up to roughly three quarters of the way through the game when my Xbox 360 broke, and I couldn’t get the controller to connect. So Army of Two was put to bed for a while, but I wanted to finish it off since I want to beat as many games as I can before the end of the year. I finally managed it late on Monday evening. I’m hoping to write a review about it that may or may not come out this Friday; it’s going to be a tough one to call though. Surely a game it took me years to find the time to beat shouldn’t get too high a score, but when I was playing it, I really enjoyed it. It has the interesting partner mechanics, tells a standard but workable story and the difficult sections weren’t too frustrating. I might come back to the game to beat it on a higher difficulty, but not just yet, I’ve got other games that need playing!

Last Week's Games: Mordheim, Crash Bandicoot, Roll the Ball

This week, I’ve been playing Mordheim: City of the Damned on my laptop. People who follow my blog posts will know that I love this game, even though it has all of its bugs and imperfections, and the fact that it tanks the power on my laptop to the point where I’m terrified it’s going to cause the blue screen of death. I started a game using Human Mercenaries late last summer and I carried on with that rather than starting again. I got through the first two campaign missions quite quickly, especially since I found how to avoid the bug I was running into last time (I think. It was a vague recollection I hesitate to dignify by calling a memory!)

I tried the third campaign mission in the Library as well, but here I ran into some difficulty. The principle enemies in the Library are Daemons, which cause terror to most of the warriors in the warband. This reduces your chance to hit and some of your strategy and offence points, which means your warriors are less effective when fighting them. The exception, of course, is Luther – the Dramatis Personae who accompanies you on the campaign missions. He is immune to fear and terror, so I over-used him to fight the Daemons. He eventually fell, but with the campaign missions, if the Dramatis Personae falls, the mission is over, though thankfully with no further consequences to your warband.

They're like onions, I've heard...

Next time I tackle that mission I’ll bring my Ogre – he is also immune to fear, and probably terror as well, so I’ll have at least two warriors that can fight the mission at full capacity. But he’s going to need some training before I take him out on a mission that vital, and the problem I’m running into is that he rarely survives any mission I take him on. When you take an Impressive class out on a mission, the AI always does the same – and theirs is usually better. They cause fear by default, and will often have abilities and hit points far in advance of yours. If they surprise you with their location, you very often find that there’s no time to wear them down first, and taking them on comes down to a straight fight between the two impressives, that yours can’t win. It doesn’t always work out that way, but more often than not it does.

There's getting through the level, then there's
beating the time trials...

While I was playing this, my girlfriend Kirsty was sat next to me playing Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy on her PS4 and I was helping her out with some of the harder bits. I’d played Crash Bandicoot sparingly before, usually when I’d been around somebody’s house, but I never owned the game so I’ve never put any substantial amount of time into it. Nonetheless, I was able to help with some of the harder platforming sections, such as in the Native Fortress and a few of the Ice levels in the second game. I even managed to get an achievement for it – the one where you “accidentally” spin away an extra life. (Funnily enough, that trophy is called “I meant to do that.”) I’m having a decent amount of fun doing it as well; 3D platformers aren’t games I play very often, and it’s nice to have a go at one from time to time.

This was one of the levels I
"cheated" on.

On my phone, I played Roll the Ball; the only game I have on there and what I play when I’m fed up of reading about Brexit on Facebook. I got to the end of the “Angle” level pack in Rotation Mode. It’s a tough set of levels as it’s not always obvious what combination of spins you need to do to guide the ball to the goal, and I confess I have had to use youtube guides for one or two of them. This is arguably cheating but if I’m getting bogged down to the point where I’m not enjoying the game anymore, then I guess it’s OK.

Last week I had the benefit of the Christmas holiday giving me some free time; I won’t get that this week and I’m expecting a busy time so next blog may be a bit lighter!