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Once upon a time, before he was forced to one side by Ms. Croft’s heaving bosom, there was talk that Crash Bandicoot was to be the mascot of the first PlayStation console. After a decent start, with three fantastic 3D platformers developed by Naughty Dog, Crash retreated into his dark years, and since has never really emerged to anything like the critical acclaim he was once used to.
Radical Entertainment, the development team behind Clash of the Titans, have so far produced the third Crash kart racer Crash Tag Team Racing, and a substandard mini-games compilation on the DS in the form of Crash Boom Bang, meaning Titans is their first traditional Crash game.
However, despite some occasional platform sections, Radical have said that around 70 percent of the game concentrates on combat, and that certainly seemed to be the case from my hands-on time. The tropical greens and angular landscape of N. Sanity Island will be familiar to any player who has enjoyed the furry bandicoot’s previous platform romps, but now wide open areas have replaced most of the ledges.
The reason for this is that much of the new combat is based on leaping onto the game’s larger enemies that give Crash of the Titans its title. As if you are stealing a car in Grand Theft Auto, Crash can jack particular enemies and take control of their movement and powers.
Rather than simply mounting them at will, Crash has to beat them into submission using flurries of basic punches before taking control. Each beast of burden has a special attack, activated on the Wii by simple gestures that actually seemed flexible to player style and consistently reactive.
However when you do reach the sporadic platform sections you do have to leave behind your lumbering beasts, as they lack the agility and the ability to jump. It is surprisingly disappointing when you do have to desert your steed, proving that despite the gimmicky nature, they do have some worth in the game.
During my hands-on time, most of the platform sections were fairly generic, though there were occasional moments that were physics-based and intriguing, such as a bridge made of several sections that moved in response to Crash’s weight. Hopefully those brief glints of inspiration are a sign of more depth and creativity tucked away, but for now the ledge leaping looks distinctly ordinary.
Other than the combat, the other new direction for Crash comes in the form of the drop-in/drop-out cooperative mode, which has come from an evolution of the ability in Radical’s Tag Team Racing to lock vehicles together to create bigger karts. In Titans, it seems that most of the spotlight in cooperative mode is simply on playing the game together, and increasing your presence in combat, but sadly the platform sections that once defined Crash become rather glitch-riddled and clunky when both of you are fighting for the camera’s attention.
Regardless, Crash of the Titans is still looking a little better than the more recent Crash games, and may still become something of a return for the furry striped bandicoot.
