4/5 ★ – james_i_think's review of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy.

The N Sane Trilogy is a mostly great remake of the original Crash Bandicoot games. This could have been a perfect remake, but there's one unfortunate factor at large to stop that from happening: Activision. As a huge Crash fan, it's very disappointing to see their crappy practices hurt one of my favourite game franchises. The hearts of the developers are certainly in the right place, but they were not afforded enough time or resources to complete this product. As a result, for every good thing I can say about it, there's a bad thing that crops up elsewhere. The analogue controls are more fluid and responsive than they've ever been - but Crash's jump arc falls just too short and his rounded hitboxes cause him to slip off some edges. The visuals are wonderfully re-designed and rendered - but the modern bloom light engine combined with common visual bugs can make the overall presentation lackluster at times. There are an impressive amount of new animations and visual details - but several of them from the original games are strangely absent. And even stranger, animations created for one game will not carry over to the other. They took the time to design and create two great and challenging new levels - which could have been spent fixing the many bugs that the new engine had introduced. As far as the games themselves go, it's almost like they started with the first game and worked their way forward - with a quickly decreasing budget and time limit. Crash 1 fares the best; it's just a better version of the game on almost all fronts (barring the tortoiseshell bounce physics). Crash 2 lacks some visual details that could have perfected it, but otherwise it's still a superior version of that game. This version of Crash 3 is just unfinished: visual bugs, bad vehicle physics, missing animations and water that looks worse than the original probably puts it behind the 1998 version. Part of all this is because they didn't have the source code of the original games, which was just another element working against the team. I really believe that if the publisher allowed it, an extra layer of polish from all departments could have fixed all of this game's issues. All things said and done, it's a very good, but flawed trilogy. I wish I could say this is the definitive way to play the Crash games, because I truly love the effort that Vicarious Visions tried to pour into this project. Activision has showed no interest in allowing the team to add the finishing touches in this game though, and that will never stop being disappointing to me. In the end this is the version that I prefer to play, and I very much enjoy 100% completing each game, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't frustratingly imperfect.