Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex (PS2)

Product Information

The majority of the characters and vehicles in the game were built and textured by Nicola Daly [31] and animated by Jeremy Pardon.

As the Bandicoots escape to resume their beach-going vacation, the ruins of the space station would crash-land onto the island of Cortex's original settlement, conveniently allowing Cortex and Uka Uka to resume their world domination bids. After completing all five levels in a VR Hub, a sixth teleportation portal to a boss fight with Crunch will appear. A lagging game camera also makes it difficult to judge perspectives, which can make navigating even the simplest of levels somewhat nightmare-ish.

After Universal fell out with Cerny and Sony, Traveller's Tales was forced to alter the game from a free-roaming title to a standard Crash title. The game was cancelled due to layoffs at Radical on February 11, 2010, and was abandoned in favor of Prototype 2. The game was meant to be a reboot of the franchise, and would have provided a new origin story for Crash, marking the beginning of a series of new adventures.

Another complaint is that the backgrounds, always well detailed in Crash games, are this time too detailed, so much so that I for had trouble telling the difference between what was there for show and what was actually out to hurt me! The main antagonist of the series, Doctor Neo Cortex, is a mad scientist who created Crash Bandicoot among other characters and now seeks Crash's elimination along with world domination.Using Coco's new Virtual Reality Hub System, Crash and Coco travel the world and gather the Crystals, fending off attacks from Cortex's superweapon, Crunch Bandicoot, and the Elementals along the way. The Xbox version of the game was announced by Universal Interactive on January 31, 2002, and features reduced loading times and improved graphics. Few details have been revealed about Traveller's Tales' original vision, but it is known that the game was intended to mark Nina Cortex's debut in the series. The graphics are most impressive, and the idea of the game - that you have to destroy the 4 elementals coupled with your stronger clone, Crunch - is irresistable! Once I get nearly half way through, I really feel only wasted opportunities of doing anything else with my time.

Thankfully, the game is 3/4 platforming and 1/4 vehicle levels, so this does not distract from the main game too much. Aku Aku: Crash, Coco, it is just as I feared; Uka Uka and Doctor Cortex have unleashed a group of destructive masks known as the Elementals. Hilary Goldstein of IGN went into further detail, dismissing Coco as "a less powerful and less enjoyable playable character" and saying "She's just not fun the way Crash is. But don't marvel too long at the new inventions, because you might find yourself in a heap of destruction. Development began on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and it was intended to be ported for Wii afterwards.Casamassina described the music as "well composed and catchy, with enough variation to keep you tapping your feet without realizing it", but criticized the voice-acting, which he felt was overdone and made some of the characters come off as annoying, and lamented the GameCube version's lack of Dolby Pro Logic support. The series debuted in 1996 with the Sony PlayStation video game Crash Bandicoot, premiered in North America on September 9, 1996. A rearranged version of the original Crash Bandicoot theme by Mutato Muzika's Josh Mancell also appears in the game. Aku Aku is an omnipotent witch doctor mask who guides and aids Crash and Coco in stopping the plans of Doctor Neo Cortex. Since the game was cancelled very early during development, no more than a few pictures and documents were produced, which cannot be publicly released due to legal issues, and all remaining staff were put to work on The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning.