Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy (2017 Remake) Review

As an art project this is close to flawless. Every level of three games is remade rather than upscaled, the animation is expressive in a way the originals could only gesture at, and the Wumpa jungle finally looks like the place the box art promised. The problem is buried in the code. All three games run on one physics model derived from the sequels, and Crash now has a pill shaped collision volume rather than the original's rectangle, so a jump that used to catch the edge of a platform slides off it instead.

The first game was already the harshest of the three, and this change sharpened it into something players who had beaten it in 1996 could not finish. Time trials added across the trilogy and the later free level drops are genuine value, and the presentation carried the series back into the conversation. But a faithful remake is judged on whether the old inputs still produce the old outcomes, and here they measurably do not.