With the aid of our new companions, we’ve finally defeated Dr N Tropy and his female counterpart from another world. Together, the quantum masks use their power to repair the fabric of spacetime. Our world saved, there’s not much more to do aside from hang out in the Sn@xx Dimension until we can hitch a ride back home.
Shouldn’t be too complicated, right? Nothing’s going to go wrong and… who am I kidding?
Thanks to GarlandTheGreat for the video we used in lieu of finishing The Crate Escape.
The more I think about that set-piece, platforming over falling shipping containers, the more convinced I am that a simple mechanic to slow down or stop time when the player stands still would have gone a long way to making it a little more doable. I remember having trouble with it in my casual run, but even then it didn’t kill me anywhere near as many times as it did here.
A problem that my stream chat also helpfully pointed out is that the adaptive difficulty system really can’t do much to make that section any easier. It could (and did) provide me Aku Aku masks, but those aren’t terribly useful. Most of my deaths came from mistiming jumps and falling, which isn’t something the masks protect from. A checkpoint would’ve been more helpful, but because the whole segment is fully in motion, there’s no safe zone to place one.
Which means if a player is having trouble, there’s not much that can be done to make it easier on them. They just have to grin and bear it, even after the Cortex section. I’d hardly call myself the best video game player around, but I’ve been around the block and played my fair share. I can’t imagine handing a segment like this to the 10-year old demographic that this game is rated for.
Hopefully, if Toys for Bob is given the chance to make another new Crash game, they can correct for some of these mistakes and make a better one for it.
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