1/5 ★ – kstrand317's review of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back.

After beating this game, I can honestly say that Crash Bandicoot is a relic of gaming history that I am content with being cast aside and forgotten. This series ages like milk left on a Florida sidewalk in the middle of July, my God this game is frustrating. Crash is possibly the worst-controlling mascot platformer I’ve played. Somehow, he manages to be both floaty and slippery to control and I’m genuinely baffled that this character is as beloved as he is. One might assume that my low opinion of this game is due to me comparing it to modern platformers, but in reality, even comparing Crash to platformers of this era does it no favors. Mario 64 feels like Odyssey when compared to this game and Banjo Kazooie runs circles around Crash in terms of characters, level, and music. While Nintendo and Rare, knowing that 3D gaming was in its infancy, prioritized slower more methodical platforming and level design to compensate for the lack of experience designing/playing in a 3D space, Naughty Dog didn’t seem to get the memo. Instead, Crash demands incredibly fast, imprecise, and difficult platforming with controls and a camera that actively fights the player. Depth perception, hit detection, and physics in general are all abysmal in this game as you will constantly swear up and down that you reached a ledge or hit an enemy but will die anyway. Sometimes it’s simply due to the angle of the camera obscuring a ledge/location of an enemy and other times, it’s straight up due to the game just not detecting that you struck an enemy, when very clearly you did. Crash is also fundamentally built on trial-and-error level design, as many MANY deaths you will encounter in this game are purely because you had no idea of some element before you were killed by it. For example, there is a level where Crash is running away from a boulder towards the camera and the game provides you boost pads which helps get some distance from the boulder. But unfortunately, some will send you careening into pits to your death and due to the angle of the camera, you have zero idea that it will do so unless you try it. This is not an isolated case, as the game is filled with moments like this, and the only way to know how to progress is to repeatedly die till you figure it out (forcing you to replay nearly entire levels, until you figure out a single jump near the end). The game’s soundtrack, world, and characters are also utterly forgettable, I cannot recall a single song, despite being able to remember multiple tracks from literally every platformer I’ve played. The levels are boring, repetitive and all blend together outside of one section of slightly interesting space-themed levels near the end (and even there the jetpack controls horribly). The worst sin of all is this game is straight-up, not fun. I know this game is from the PlayStation 1 and as such, I wasn’t expecting the world from it, but I feel it’s reasonable to expect it to be some level of fun. It was a wasted effort remastering these games and I cannot recommend these games to a single person, regardless of taste or gaming experience. I love Naughty Dog, I love 3D Platformers, but for the love of God, I never want them to touch this genre with a 10-foot pole again.