Crash Bandicoot Review

Crash Bandicoot earns its high marks for craft and its modest one for play. Naughty Dog's engineers performed genuine sorcery on the PlayStation, streaming lush, densely modeled jungle corridors from the CD with a custom toolchain that squeezed out detail rivals could not touch, and the result gave Sony the cartoon mascot it badly wanted against Mario and Sonic. But where Super Mario 64 opened 3D space wide that same year, Crash runs down a hallway.

The into-the-screen sections make depth itself the enemy, with jumps whose landing points the fixed camera actively hides, and the boulder-chase reversals are memorable set dressing on trial-and-error memorization. Checkpoints are stingy, hitboxes exacting, and the box-breaking completion demands of gem hunting turn charm into attrition. The story is a sentence about a mad scientist and a stolen bandicoot girlfriend. It is a landmark of production values and personality, and a merely adequate platformer inside them.