Crash Bandicoot was born out of necessity. The PlayStation was released when mascot character based platforming games were still all the rage, and while Nintendo had Mario and Sega had NiGHTs (Sonic was M.I.A. for the most part on the Saturn) Sony didn’t really have a good answer. This is when they, along with Universal Interactive gave funding to a small time developer named Naughty Dog. Crash Bandicoot was born from this deal and the rest is history; it was a huge success and made the company what it is today. The game spawned two more sequels and several spin-offs before the franchise was swooped on by another developer. The original trilogy has been long discussed by fans and the games are generally considered some of the best platformers of all time. I recently gave the original a go, and found that it’s a decent title, but in this day and age it’s barely worth returning to. Crash is certainly a product of its time.
The story here focuses on the titular character Crash Bandicoot. His intelligence as well as abilities were the result of an experiment by the evil Dr. Neo Cortex. His purpose is to create an army of beasts and have Crash lead them to victory over the humans that previously laughed at and ridiculed the unorthodox doctor. Cortex fails to control Crash as he manages to escape leaving his girlfriend Bandicoot behind. The game begins as he sets out to rescue her and defeat the mad professor once and for all. Crash Bandicoot is a rather unconventional 3D platform game. You have no control over the camera and it displays the action from a variety of different angles. Typically it follows behind you from a fixed perspective, but other times from the side and even in front looking back at Crash. This adds some much needed variety to the game.
Rather than focus on exploration Crash instead is based around good old fashioned platforming. The environments are all rather narrow and they don’t even fill the screen horizontally. You can move left and right, back and foward, but the stages are very focused and linear. Aside from this Crash plays very much like your typical platforming game. This marsupial comes armed with the traditional ability to jump, but he can also attack enemies by spinning which is performed by pressing the square button. Rather than coins or rings Crash instead gathers colorful wumpa fruit with one hundred of them giving you an extra life. By default a single touch by an enemy will take away one of your lives as well as throw you back to the last check point you reached in the particular stage. A special mask item allows you to survive one attack, and gathering three of them grants Crash temporary invulnerability. Aside from that the only other items in this game are special character icons which whisk you off to a bonus round. Crash Bandicoot is a little simple by the standards at the time of its release, but there’s nothing wrong with focusing on the basics.
The game features three different varieties of basic gameplay. The first is the standard platforming as I mentioned earlier, but the second has Crash running toward the camera while trying to outrun rolling boulders. In some areas our unorthodox hero jumps on the back of a hog (only after looking back at the player and giving a hilarious and disturbing expression). Running toward the camera away from the giant boulders makes for some extremely difficult and tricky platforming segments. I found myself constantly struggling with this, but to be honest I never particularly enjoyed these sections. The hog riding stages fare a little better, but unfortunately these too are largely uninspired and they’re just standard auto running areas. Although these switch ups do keep the gameplay a little fresh the level design is for the most part a little uninspired. The stages generally feel very similar to one another, and there’s only three separate worlds in the entire game. The lack of exploration really hurts the package as well. The first Crash Bandicoot has some solid platforming, but there just isn’t enough variety to maintain my interest.
Crash Bandicoot looks pretty decent for a first generation PlayStation title, but by modern standards it’s fairly ugly. The characters and enemies are jagged with seriously low polygon counts, but they animate well enough that pretty soon you won’t even notice this shortcoming. The art style is very weird to me. While the environments are a little plain (at least in the first world) the rest of the game goes for that odd mid 90s ‘cool’ video game vibe. The enemies in particular look awful and many feature next to no textures or details. This game doesn’t suffer as bad from the classic polygon warping that plagued almost every single 3D title on the platform which is surprising. The framerate is also really good and maintains throughout no matter how much is going on at once. Crash is a mixed bag graphically, but on a technical level it’s decent.
The soundtrack is largely uninspired. It’s bouncy and fun, but none of the tracks are particularly memorable or even inspired. The title theme is about as generic as they come as well as pretty much all of the various stage themes. In addition I really don’t like the basic tribal theme the game incorporates. I don’t know if it was the television on which I was playing but the sound clarity was kind of bad in general to be honest. The voice overs in particular suffer from this, and during the opening cinema I had a very difficult time making out what was even being said because it’s so bad. The audio in Crash Bandicoot is disappointing considering this is on a CD after all.
Crash Bandicoot is a decent game overall. It’s not a must-play platformer by any means, but some of the ideas introduced here are interesting, and the level design does have its moments. If you’re looking for a platformer from the era then you could do a lot better with both Super Mario 64 and even NiGHTs (if you consider it a platform game, that is.) Crash is a little disappointing considering it was one of the flagship titles for the system, but it’s at least worth a look.
