Crash Bandicoot 4 finally came out after years of waiting and it was well received by everyone. New players love it and old fans of Crash love it just as much. It’s a true return to form, but it has one glaring flaw.

I’m sure if you’ve paid attention to any reviews of Crash 4 you know what I’m talking about. It’s the fact that the game is great as long as you’re not going for completion. For those not in the know, the original Crash trilogy heavily incentivised 100% completion by rewarding you with gems for destroying every box in a level and relics for doing time trials unlocked after finishing a level. Some even had hidden gems that would give you access to even more levels to play. Getting 100% would then get you a secret ending.

It felt really good in those games to go for 100% largely in part because the levels were fairly short and it always felt like an achievable goal. Crash 4 has this problem where it does the exact same thing but the levels are significantly larger, with some having over 500 boxes to find and many of them being hidden.

You could argue that it’s actually a good thing. After all, Crash is all about breaking boxes and platforming and having more of that can’t be a bad thing. I beg to differ. I think an interesting way to argue my point would be to compare Crash 4 to another platformer that I absolutely love; Rayman Origns, and also its sequel Rayman Legends.

Just like Crash 4, Rayman Origins is a reboot of a beloved classic platformer franchise with beautiful new graphics and buttery smooth gameplay. You might think this comparison a bit strange because the original Rayman games had very little in common with Crash Bandicoot. However, Rayman Origins introduced a feature wherein you gain rewards for collecting a certain amount of lums in a level, as well as for finding hidden coins.

In this way, Origins is very similar to Crash Bandicoot in that it strongly enoucrages the player to collect everything they can in a level. It even has time trials just like Crash. But the interesting thing is that I couldn’t stand the idea of going for 100% completion in Crash 4 whereas I’ve completed both Rayman Legends and Origins on more than one occasion. Why is that?

To start with, the newer Rayman games are far more forgiving than Crash 4. Both games have a checkpoint system but they’re very frequent in Rayman. This means that when you die, you don’t lose that much progress and you can get back to where you were pretty quickly. In Crash 4, the checkpoints can often be quite far apart. If you were just going straight from one to the other it wouldn’t be so bad, but getting all the boxes in between one checkpoint and another can be quite time consuming as well as challenging. There will be occasions where you get 10s of boxes in a section, only to fall at the last hurdle and have to get them all again. It’s demoralising and tedious because you know can do it but now you have to do it all over again.

In my opinion, the checkpoints should be much closer together. After all, once you’ve proven you can overcome a challenge in a level, what merit is there in having to do it mulitple times just to get a little bit further?

Another way in which the two games are similar is that they both want the player to search for hidden areas. Crash 4 has hidden gems in each level and some of them are practically impossible to find without someone telling you where they are. The same goes for some of the boxes. Often they’re off screen or hidden behind parts of the level where you can’t move the camera to see. In these levels, you end up taking things very slowly and panning the camera around every area just to find one or two boxes.

Again, it makes the game tedious to play. It also seriously harms the pacing of the game. Crash 4 should be exciting and fun but there’s nothing fun about stopping before and after each new platforming challenge to look around for things that might be boxes or hidden pathways.

Rayman, on the other hand, makes its secrets a bit easier to find. This might sound counter intuitive to the whole idea of them being hidden secret areas but for the most part they’re not in-your-face obvious. The game gives you an audio cue when you’re near one so you know when and where you should be looking. That way you don’t waste time searching every nook and cranny in a level for that one secret. Hunting for hidden areas never brings the game to a dead halt like in Crash 4.

The final aspect for comparison is a bit more general. It’s about the length of the levels and the actual critera for getting the completion rewards. In Rayman levels are generally a lot shorter than in Crash 4. There are a few longs ones but by and large they go by pretty quick. This makes it so it doesn’t feel too bad when you have to replay one to get all the lums, whereas it’s a pain in Crash 4 knowing you have to play a level that already took you 10 or more minutes just because you missed a box.

That’s the other thing. Crash games will only give you the gem at the end of a level if you get every single box. Rayman only asks that you collect a certain amount of lums. It still wants you get most of them but you don’t have to get all of them so it’s a good deal more forgiving. Now you could say this whole comparison is unfair because Crash 4 also rewards gems for collecting a certain amount of Wumpa fruit. However even though they’re both essentially the same as Mario’s coins or Sonic’s rings, I don’t think they’re comparable in this situation. Crash 4 almost always gives you more than enough wumpa fruit just by going through the level normally without breaking all the boxes.

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You rarely have to seek them out. In Rayman Origins, even though the lums are the main collectible, you have to at least find some of the hidden ones to get the reward at the end of the level. In that way, they’re more like Crash’s boxes, mechanically speaking. They encourage you to explore the level and get as many of them as you can.

So what have we learned through this comparison? Well, it all comes down to Crash 4 being too punishing and Rayman being a lot more forigiving. They both encourage you to collect as much stuff as you can in a level, but Crash 4 demands perfection and necessitates slowing down to a crawl in almost every level to achieve it, while Rayman points you in the direction you need to go without being too explicit and doesn’t force you to replay large chunks of a level over and over again.

I do like Crash 4 and I think it’s a good game but I hope Toys For Bob changes their design ideology for Crash 5. Boxes should be fun to collect, rather than feeling like a chore.

What did you think about Crash Bandicoot 4? Did you go for 100% completion or just forget about the gems? Leave a comment down below and let me know.

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