During the first quarter of last year, Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure saw Crash Bandicoot in his debut GBA adventure. Developed by Vicarious Visions (of Tony Hawks Pro Skater fame), the game offered an enjoyable platforming experience, although it didn’t quite live up to the standards set by Mario, Sonic and co. Nearly a year later Vivendi Universal serve up a second helping of platforming antics starring everyone’s favourite Bandicoot. Despite offering a large number of levels and an initial amount of variety, this latest offering is a distinctly average affair.
Story:
Another Crash Bandicoot game, another evil super-villain with a plan for world domination. This time Crash will have to face a trio of villains; Aku Aku, Dr. Nefarious Tropy and N. Trance. Their devious plan this time is to brainwash the Bandicoot-clan to do their dirty work. After successfully capturing and brainwashing Crash’s sister Coco and friend Crunch, N. Tropy and N. Trance (the master of hypnotism), go after Crash himself. Of course, no villain’s evil plans ever work out and they capture Fake Crash instead of the real one. Crash must once again save the day by firstly rescuing Coco and Crunch, and ultimately defeating all three of his evil enemies. The story is told through numerous cut scenes at the beginning of the game and in between key stages.
Gameplay:
Upon playing the game for the first time your initial impression will be that it has received very few changes in the passing of a year. In the case of this game, your first impression would be correct. N-Tranced looks, feels and plays almost identically to the previous title. The selection of moves on offer is near identical allowing Crash to run, jump and spin around the levels. Additionally, the body slam move, which allows Crash to slam the ground with a crate smashing attack, has been included as a default move. As with the previous title, four special moves including the super slide, double jump and the rocket jump can be earned on completion of each of the four main game worlds.
Once again the main aspect of the gameplay revolves around the destruction of crates. These crates have differing purposes; some are there to serve as destructible platforms allowing you to reach higher areas. Others, such as the TNT and Nitro crates, are there to make the game more challenging. Three additional types of crates have now been included that weren’t available in The Huge Adventure. These are the Copter Crate (straps a Heli-Pack onto Crash’s back allowing him to fly), the Freeze Crate (freezes enemies in their current place for a short period of time) and the Magic Carpet Crate (this allows Crash to fly on a magic carpet genie-style). The addition of these crates, particularly the first and last, definitely help to inject some much needed variety into the repetitive platforming parts of the game.
The side scrolling stages of the game are fairly entertaining, but after a while they all start to look and feel the same. What doesn’t help this problem is the poor selection of enemies spread throughout the levels. Almost all of them can be killed with one short spin from Crash, and whilst there may be a few that require a slightly different tactic, they are never too taxing on the brain. The overall feel of the platforming parts of the game is fairly solid and entertaining, and the controls are always responsive. I did find one annoying complaint with the controls, and that’s the way Crash negotiates ropes. Instead of using the standard platform convention of pressing up and down on the d-pad, in N-Tranced you must press the jump button (A) to climb up. Pressing down on the d-pad sends Crash sliding down until you press up again. Although it sounds fairly simple in concept, in practice it is immensely frustrating as you’ll frequently end up dropping off the bottom of ropes plummeting into bottomless or fire-filled pits, thus resulting in instant death.
The basic goal in each of the platforming stages is to collect a crystal and then reach the end of the level. By doing so you can complete the basic set of levels available. However there are numerous rewards for more dedicated players, the best of these being a selection of unlockable bonus levels. These are unlocked by collecting all of the coloured gem shards hidden throughout the many levels. There are three different types of gem shards; red, blue and green, each corresponding to a similarly colour-coded bonus stage. Additionally, a clear gem is rewarded for destroying all of the crates in each level, which are only useful to earn you an 100% completion rating.
To break up what would otherwise be a repetitive experience, Vicarious Visions have included three additional gameplay styles, two of which play similarly to the pseudo-3D stages featured in the last game. These come in the form of a group of water-skiing stages where you must escape the jaws of a huge shark and the space-based ‘run from the sun’ stages. I didn’t really enjoy the space stages, but the water-based ones were entertaining and had you jumping over ramps and avoiding numerous obstacles. There was one distinct problem with these sections though, and that is the lack of variety they offer. Of the three shark and two space stages included, the only real difference between them is the increased difficulty level. Some sort of variety, possibly in the form of differing obstacles and enemies, would have been nice here. It’s also sometimes hard to judge the depth of the screen, making it hard to pinpoint where enemies, obstacles and crates are placed.
The final of the three additional gameplay styles are the stages that take place in the Atlasphere arena. In these stages, Crash roles around increasingly difficult maze-like levels inside a spherical cage. Whilst rolling around crash must negotiate twisted paths and ramps whilst avoiding the precariously placed nitro crates and rolling barrels. Falling off the edge of the level results in instant death, sending Crash back to the beginning of the stage unless he has reached one of the checkpoints. There are three of these stages featured in the game, but once again they only differ in terms of challenge. All of the stages feature the same basic obstacles and graphical theme.
Lifespan:
Despite offering around 30 main stages, Crash Bandicoot: N-Tranced isn’t the longest of games available. The stages, although fairly decently sized, aren’t that challenging, and those that are have been made a lot easier due to the inclusion of two checkpoints in each level. This breaks the levels down into three fairly short chunks, which may reduce the frustration level, but it doesn’t help extend the lifespan of this game. I completed the basic set of levels in what must have been no longer than 3 hours. Of course, I still had the coloured gems to go back and collect to unlock the three bonus stages, but that will only add around an hour to the time you spend with the game depending on how thoroughly you played it through the first time. To beat the game with a 100% rating you will need to go back and replay each level by destroying all of the crates and also beating the time trials for each stage. It’s unlikely that the game will hold your attention span for that long though. If you’ve got a friend with a copy of the game, the inclusion of a couple of multiplayer game modes (Atlasphere battles and Link Race) will surely provide you with a couple more hours of fun.
Graphics:
The last Crash game on the GBA was visually impressive, and you can expect the same from this title. If anything the graphics are slightly more detailed and colourful this time around, although some of the enemy sprites are a little bland. The animation is also as smooth and fluid as it was in the Huge Adventure. However, as with many other aspects of the game, the graphics suffer from an overall lack of variety. Of the 20 or so platform stages there are only three noticeably different level themes; desert island, Persian buildings and Egyptian ruins. Other than the inclusion of lava in the later levels and the change colour in the background graphics, there isn’t much to differentiate level from level. It’s all very nice to look it, it just would have been nice to see some more variety.
Music:
Overall, the music featured throughout the game is of a good standard. Some of the tunes featured almost echo the style of the music featured in Rare’s Donkey Kong Country series, which isn’t a bad thing. Once again though, and you’ll have noticed a pattern here; there is a lack in the number of tunes featured throughout the stages, resulting in the repeated use of most of the music over and over again. The Atlasphere, shark and sun chase stages each have their own track, and there are three different types of music featured in the platform stages. One of the more repetitive tracks (usually featured in the Egyptian themed levels) gets very annoying after a while. The sound effects sound pretty similar to those of the last game, which were neither above nor below average.
Closing Comments:
With Crash’s second GBA title, Vicarious Visions haven’t really added that much to what was a reasonably solid platformer that didn’t really amaze in the first place. Whilst there are no real faults with N-Tranced other than the lack of variety in level design and presentation, this game pales in comparison to what games like Sonic Advance, Yoshi’s Island, Wario Land 4 and Super Mario World offer. If you’ve played all of those games to death and are looking for an entertaining platformer to tide you over until the next selection of platformers get released, then Crash Bandicoot 2 might be worth a look, particularly if you enjoyed the first title. Otherwise, if you have something else to keep you entertained you would be advised to miss out on this one. Overall, N-Tranced is more of the same of what Vicarious Vissions offered with the first Crash game, and I was disappointed to see the lack of new ideas and lack of variety evident in this title.
