Among the series that have marked the childhood of entire generations of gamers, Crash Bandicoot can boast the indisputable value of having remained extraordinarily faithful to itself over the decades. While everything changed quickly, both in the real world and in the video game world, the franchise never strayed from its roots and, save for a few four-wheeled interludes and a few spin-offs with an exquisitely party tone, we never even remotely dreamed of give up that simple and ingenious platform game that has engraved in our consciences the contours of the most famous game in the world.
Having paid off the debt with the main series, developing a new Crash Bandicoot capable of strongly relaunching the series in the contemporary world after ten years of waiting, Toys for Bob has chosen to try something different with Crash Team Rumble, a multiplayer experiment intended offering something very, very different from any other game that has been released under the orange marsupial umbrella.
What does this strange Wumpa fruit taste like? As you will discover in Team Crush Rumble Review It's vaguely bittersweet.
A new species of Bandicoot
There is no denying it, Crash Team Rumble was born from a fascinating and evocative idea, a natural consequence of a creative freedom that Toys for Bob, in its interactions with the series, had perhaps never been able to explore. Of course, in 2020 the studio had assumed the responsibility of working on a new chapter of the main series, but in doing so it had inevitably followed the footprints left by that unlimited wealth of platform adventures that represents Crash's legacy. After the great success of It's About Time, this time the Californian studio had the opportunity to experiment with a Completely original video game., taking our beloved marsupial to horizons never before touched by the series.
In a long talk with which we had the opportunity to exchange Pablo Yan e Daniel Neil, respectively studio co-director and creative director of Toys for Bob, the two developers spoke to us about how, despite the obstacles, the entire project germinated in a very coherent way, from a simple question: is it possible to translate the experience ? The classic Crash Bandicoot (with the boxes, the platforms, the Wumpa fruits and everything else) in an exclusively multiplayer title?
The team has condensed all the possible answers to this question in Crash Team Rumble, creating a four on four fighter which contains all the characteristic elements of the series, including that natural immediacy that has always made it accessible to players of all ages. Precisely in this sense, the rules underlying the game are very easy to assimilate from the first game: two teams of four players each have the sole objective of collecting Wumpa fruits, distributed in arenas that closely resemble the design of the Crash levels. Bandicoot. historians, to deliver them to their team's bench, while they try to hinder their opponents. Whoever deposits 2.000 first wins the game, gets all the glory and the indisputable right to make fun of his rivals.
Playability, between immediacy and complexity
Described like this, the game The foundations of Crash Team Rumble may seem extraordinarily elementary, but within its code hides an underlying complexity that surprised us. Crash Team Rumble is not, in fact, set up as a messy fighting game, but rather as an elegant one, in which each player, in the apparent chaos of a game, plays a very specific role within the team. Forget running around like crazy in search of Wumpas, the action is governed by the presence of three different categories of heroes, each of them capable of identifying with exceptional precision what you are expected to do using one of the eight characters included in the game.
By choosing the iconic peramele, which is configured as one of the markers More effectively, your task will only be to accumulate the greatest number of Wumpa fruits in your bank, trying to be faster than the other Markers, such as Tawna and Catbat. HE Defenders, like Dingodile, N. Brio and N. Tropy, instead represent the muscles of a formation and, despite the name, their main role will not be to protect the allied bank, but to invade the opposite one, preventing rivals from . to take advantage of their prized Wumpa fruits. HE Enhancers, Coco and Neo Cortex, are finally tasked with activating the numerous power-ups scattered throughout the arenas, which closely refer to two resources such as gems and relics, which Crash Bandicoot veterans will know perfectly well.
And Crash Team Rumble, le jewel They are nothing more than large platforms that, once conquered, guarantee the entire team a substantial multiplier for the Wumpa fruits collected, while the relics, scattered around the map, can be used to obtain powerful personal and team bonuses capable of subverting the trend of a match, if redeemed at the right time. In short, considering the strategic element that characterizes the multiplayer formula of Crash Team Rumble, the new title from the Californian studio has a lot in common with experiences of the caliber of Overwatch, a series in which Toys for Bob has actively collaborated in its recent past.
Goal and (im)balance of the game
It didn't take long, in the company of Crash Team Rumble, to see the quirks and facets of each character's unique move sets emerge, capable of characterizing fights in an unexpectedly marked way. Each member of the roster has unique abilities, which together form the pieces of a real one. arches which has all the potential to further deepen the gaming formula proposed by Toys for Bob. Following a typical Chinese logic, each character offers counterattacks, not strictly related to the division into categories between Markers, Defenders and Boosters.
Take the case of Crash, our choice of order for most of the review. During the first few games, the marsupial suffered greatly from the influence of a powerful Defender like Dingodile, who had many more HP than any other Marker. In the ranked matches, Crash was swept, but as the matches continued we discovered that Dingodile, completely devoid of vertical attacks, was dangerously exposed to attacks. crushed of Crash, extraordinarily effective against all the most massive characters. This also applies to other heroes and villains included in the game and if, on the one hand, this represents an absolute strong point of the production developed by Toys for Bob, on the other, it only took us one afternoon to identify some obvious cracks in the system. . .
In the current situation, Crash Team Rumble seemed to us to be a victim of a few different ones. imbalances, which could end up compromising the progress of a game, as soon as the community manages to select those characters capable of eliminating any possibility of collecting Wumpa fruits in a bank. Another painful point is represented by the deep and irrecoverable content drought: The title offers a good number of maps at launch, but only one game mode and only eight characters, too little to convince the community to stick with Crash Team Rumble, both in the long and short term. The developers have promised to progressively expand the gaming experience with alternating seasons and battle passes, but with the €29,99 entry barrier required for purchase, Toys for Bob's new effort runs the serious risk of being lost in the the limitless sea of multiplayer experiences that today fill the digital libraries of PCs and consoles as far as the eye can see.
Technical sector
on technical front, Crash Team Rumble is presented on PS5 without critical problems, also because the entire experience is put at the service of a commitment aimed at guaranteeing unwavering performance, at least on current generation consoles. The compromise, which we gladly accept, is clean, colorful and cartoonish graphics, without who knows what details or effects, but faithful to Crash's identity. Developed with Unreal Engine 4, the game, as expected, takes up the style of the latest installments of the series and, despite the scenarios rather devoid of details, offers performance absolutely in line with the expectations of a multiplayer title.
Different speech for him Sonoro, which instead masterfully displays and reproduces some of the series' most iconic motifs and effects, combining them with a sound design to match. The game is entirely dubbed into Spanish, an aspect that should not be underestimated if we take into account that the decisive moments of the match are marked by the announcements of a presenter who, if he had spoken in English, would not have been understandable for a large part. of the public.
Conclusions
Tested version PlayStation 5 digital delivery playstation store, Xbox Store Price 29,99 € Holygamerz.com 7.0 Readers (15) 7.2 your voteThe encounter with the final version of Crash Team Rumble allowed us to substantially confirm all those good impressions that arose during the beta, but also to see ourselves entangled in those same doubts that we told you about just a few months ago. The multiplayer brawler developed by Toys for Bob was born from a good idea, that of applying the platform element typical of Crash Bandicoot to an online competitive formula, but with a very small number of content available to players and quite a few balance problems. profoundly affect the result of the experiment conceived by the Californian study. Developers will have to take immediate action if they do not want their creation to sink into the quicksand of a genre like multiplayer titles that has no mercy even for pearls.
PRO
- The formula works, it's immediate and really fun.
- Deep technical dynamics hide behind an apparent simplicity.
AGAINST
- The cast of characters is not extensive at all.
- Very little content at launch.
- The progression system remains a mystery.
