Crash Bandicoot has returned to PlayStation 4 with a beautiful remaster of the original trilogy, and already it’s become one of the best-selling games on Sony’s console. Nevertheless, there were many ways in which it could have been improved.
Join us as we take a look at eight features that would have really elevated theCrash PS4 Trilogy to another level.
1. A restart option in the menu
When playing through the game, there is no option to restart the level right off the bat; only throughout Time Trial are you able to restart it. However, when you’re on a run to collect all the boxes and/or want to get the special gems, a restart can be a welcome option, ensuring that you don’t have to quit the level and reload it again.
2. Photo mode
A lot of remasters – such as The Last of Us, the Uncharted series and Skyrim — have already made their way to the PS4 with a few small improvements as well as enhancements. One of these new improvements is the photo mode, where the game pauses in the middle of the action when the option is activated, which allows you to set a variety of options to take a screenshot any way you like. In the N-Sane Trilogy, however, this option is not available. When knowing the games contain more than a 100 death animations for Crash alone, a photo mode would have been a fun addition to make silly screenshots throughout playing.
3. A nod to the original trilogy
During a few cutscenes with Coco using her laptop, we see a nod to Naughty Dog – as Uncharted 4 is playing on the laptop. While the three games have stayed 100% truthful to the original trilogy, it would still be a fun addition to have a nod to the original, such as playing with the original game music or maybe playing with an original Crash Bandicoot skin. Especially for the players who played the original games, a nod would have been a nice extra.
4. Graphics/fps switching option
The remastered trilogy has been made to run at 1440p and 30 fps, which is perfectly fine as when playing the games there isn’t any lag and they run perfectly as well as look gorgeous throughout. However, it would have been nice to be able to switch to 1080p and 60 fps to see how the game would play when it would run at double the frames (per second). Perhaps it would even help with the difficult parts, giving you a steadier feeling in controls due to it running more smoothly?
5. Control schematic (and maybe an option to change them)
As we already stated in our review, there is no way to actually view the controls when playing the game. When starting the first level, you get a quick look at the basic buttons, but they don’t explain everything and it disappears quite fast as well. There is no option in the menu where you can have a look at the controls to refresh your mind on some of Crash’s moves. It would be a useful option in the menu to have a look at those moves with their respective controls so people can have a quick glance on how to play with Crash whenever they want to. In addition, an option to change these controls to a different button could be a useful setting too. For instance, in Cortex Strikes Back, when you get the speed boots, they are bound to R2, while sliding is bound to circle and R1. When you’re used to sliding with R1 it can be a hassle to use the speed boots and run through time trial.
6. Statistics view
When playing through Crash, you’ll likely die loads of times. You also have to jump a lot of times, collect a lot of wumpa fruit, fall into pits, etc. Point being; a statistics view would be an interesting addition to have as you’d have a perspective on how long you’ve played the game, how many times you’ve died and many more statistics you could add.
7. Time Trial overview
With the remaster, Vicarious Visions brought the Time Trials from Warped to the first and second title of the trilogy. There are three types of relics; sapphire is the easiest relic, followed by gold and last but definitely not least, the platinum relic. Before entering the level, with the use of R1, you can view the time you have to beat to get the next relic in place; if you have no relic earned, that means it’ll show you the time to beat for the sapphire relic. For those who are aiming to get a platinum trophy in these games, it would be a nice feature to have an overview where you could see the times to beat and the times you earned without having to enter each level specifically.
8. Developer commentary
During interviews, Vicarious Visions often explained how they took the remaster very seriously and went very deep into recreating the exact same feeling that people had when playing the original game. For a lot of fans of the series, as well as for those who are interested in what work goes into a game, developer commentary would have been very interesting to listen to whilst playing the game or maybe some extras with video content. Interesting snippets of Information such as how the devised the characters or recreated the levels would have been excellent.
There you have it, that’s our list of missing features that we think could make the N-Sane Trilogy just a little bit spicier. Are you missing anything in the remasters? Let us know in the comments below!
