Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (PlayStation 4) review "The number of times Crash crashed on the final stage is something my pride won't allow me to disclose."

Ever have one of those experiences where you like a game and the time you spend with it is enjoyable — even excellent — but something just isn't quite clicking, leaving you with a really fun time that just doesn't hit all the right notes and leaves you feeling a bit unfulfilled? I have because I recently played through Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time.

I'd open by joking that I should have known better, considering Crash 4 shares the same sub-title as one of the really crappy Amityville films, but like I said, the problem isn't that it's bad. It's that it fell a bit short of elite and left me vaguely disappointed for reasons I'm sure I'll struggle to properly explain. After all, I finished playing it over a month ago and it's taken me this long just to start typing up my thoughts.

Back in the days of the original PlayStation, I never really got into the Crash Bandicoot series, only renting one of the games and playing it briefly. Back in the late 90s, I guess I just wasn't in the mood for platformers. In more recent years, though, that has changed. So, when Toys for Bob developed the first new Crash game in over a decade in 2020, I was more than ready.

So, a bit of synopsis for people who don't want to do a deep dive into the plot of a platformer series. Crash is a good humanoid animal who escaped from the lab of the bad Dr. Cortex. Crash has some friends, while the doctor has his own allies whose schemes have to be thwarted game after game. And that's about all I have to contribute on that. I'm not exactly Wikipedia except for how I also beg people for money on a regular basis.

Apparently Cortex's last confrontation with Crash didn't exactly go according to plan, as he opens the game trapped in another dimension along with arrogant cohort Dr. N. Tropy and sentient mask Uka Uka. The latter of that trio is able to tear a hole in the space-time continuum at the expense of expending all its power, allowing the other two to escape without a thought for their former ally. Now, Crash and sibling Coco have to travel from dimension to dimension, meeting friends and once again thwarting the villains.

First, the positives. This is a very pretty game with a wide variety of places for you to visit throughout different worlds and times — some of which are pretty memorable. One world opens with a Mardi Gras-themed level before moving to a swamp, while another concludes with a lengthy jaunt through an alien landscape. You'll venture through a futuristic city and a post-apocalyptic wasteland, while also running and jumping through an armada of pirate ships and trying like hell to outpace a rampaging dinosaur.

You'll also control a variety of characters. While the only difference between Crash and Coco is gender, the other three — who all spend a limited amount of time as your on-screen avatar — give you a few moves beyond jumping and spinning. Tawna is another bandicoot, but one who has a few differing abilities, such as a grappling hook that allows her to clear large gaps. Dingodile is a large, cumbersome sort who is capable of using a hand-held vacuum to briefly hover in mid-air, as well as suck in explosive crates to fire at foes. Even old adversary Cortex joins the fun, both as a bumbling foe whose actions help Crash and Coco advance past obstacles and as a reluctant ally after all that bumbling finally persuades N. Tropy he'd be more likely to succeed without that lead weight dragging him down. The not-so-good doctor brings a blaster gun that's capable of turning enemies into platforms and also can dash through the air.

Really, controlling all of these characters is fun enough to make me wish they all had a larger presence in the game than one full level and parts of a few more. With the Crash/Coco duo controlling like most every notable platformer protagonist of the last forever, it was a lot of fun to have the chance to play with folk who made me adjust my style of play to their abilities.

This game also brings the goods if you're looking for a challenge, as many of its levels can be very challenging to complete, let alone collect all the fruit and break all the crates in a (likely failed) bid to completely clear them. There are a lot of precision jumps that will need to be made, while often dodging attacks from a variety of foes — some of which are invulnerable to basic attacks. Various forms of explosive crates serve as lethal obstacles, as well as the typical trappings of this sort of game such as spikes, lasers and bottomless pits. And there also are the masks.

As you play through, the game, you'll collect four masks that each will regularly pop up for you to wear during portions of levels. The first allows you to shift matter from solid to transparent and back again, allowing you to break transparent crates and jump on transparent platforms, while also making obstacles vanish. A bit later, your second mask turns your basic spin attack into a tornado capable of destroying previously indestructible foes, as well as jump extremely long distances. The next mask temporarily slows down time, so you can advance through fast-moving obstacles or use quickly-plummeting objects as platforms. Finally, you'll get the ability to reverse gravity, allowing you to make it through vast chambers in which your regular jump has no chance in hell of making it up to the next platform.

On their own, these masks tend to be fun to use. Near the end, the game gets really sadistic with their application, culminating in the final regular stage where you'll be switching back-and-forth between all four of them almost on a jump-by-jump basis. If you haven't mastered how to use them and figured out how each one alters your momentum, good luck in reaching the final boss fight. Now, to be fair, Crash 4 does make an honest attempt to mitigate how difficult things can be via a touch of dynamic difficulty. Die a few times in a particular area and you'll start your next live(s) equipped with an item that allows you to absorb a hit before perishing. Die a few times more and there's a chance an extra checkpoint crate will be placed in the level, so you don't have to advance quite as far to reach one. I mean, you'll get no extra checkpoints in that final stretch of that hellish Cortex Castle level when you actually will likely be begging to get thrown a bone, but you will get them throughout most of the game!

But the game's difficulty wasn't the reason this game fell a bit short of my hopes. As I've gotten older, I've become more and more welcoming of the high level of difficulty some platformers deliver, with the two Rayman games I own for the XBox 360 being highlights in my game library because of that factor. For me, Crash 4 simultaneously (and perhaps contradictorily) has too much and not enough stuff to do.

The "not enough" part is easy to explain. While there are a total of 10 worlds to visit in the base game, each one only contains two or three levels, with half of them concluding with a boss-only stage. To mitigate that, we have the "too much" factor. First, these levels tend to be way larger than I've been conditioned to in this sort of game. I'll feel a level should be about over and there will be another set of challenges. And another. And another, until by the time I've finished, I'm just exhausted because I spent what felt like forever white-knuckling my controller and contorting my body in the hopes that'll help Crash clear a particularly diabolical stunt.

Get through a certain amount of a stage without dying and you might find a VCR tape that will give you access to special, brutally difficult, obstacle courses known as Flashback levels. Get a little ways into the game and you'll gain N. Verted Mode, allowing you to replay any previously cleared stage, but with various visual filters placed over it to make things trickier. And if you want to 100 percent this thing, you'll have to do all of this stuff, do it perfectly and probably have to clear strict time trials, as well. I'd prefer a larger game with 60 or so levels that aren't necessarily gigantic instead of one that's half that size with massive stages where the challenge is to do everything flawlessly in order to unlock a slightly altered ending.

By the time I was done with Crash 4, I think I was more fatigued than I ever have been from one of these games. It was fun to play, had a nice variety in controllable characters and some beautiful and imaginative levels. But those levels could take forever to clear and the trade-off for that was there weren't that many of them and the game's replay value primarily seemed to come from drilling them over and over until the world has ended in the hopes of attaining perfection. Yeah, that's not my style. If mastering a game is more important than simply experiencing it, this might be a perfect game for fans of big-time challenges; if not, the experience will be really good, but fall short of true greatness.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (July 14, 2023) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.