captaind's Full Review: Crash of the Titans for Nintendo Wii
Crash of the Titans is a great little platform type game starring Crash Bandicot, a well-known character to video game fans (even to people like me who've never played his previous game[s]) and he's off to save his annoying sister (I suspect she's supposed to be cool, but she is simply annoying) and the world in general from an evil megalomaniac. What could be more fun?
The evil megalomaniac in question, Dr Neo Cortex (hilariously voiced by Lex Lang) is planning to engineer mutant minions, mega robots and wreak general mayhem on the universe. The annoying sister (Coco, voiced by the improbably named Debi Derryberry, who has lent her voice to many video games and animated movies) gets captured by Cortex and the evil genius Uka Uka (John Di Maggio). The good brother of these two floating voodoo masks, Aku Aku (Greg Eagles), vows to fight the good fight, but isn't very effective. With all other options frozen by an ice ray, it is of course the dull-witted but incredibly agile and versatile Crash (Jess Harnell) to save the day. Or two incarnations of Crash, should you have two players.
The first level starts you off very gently and there's a Samuel Jackson-esque narrator (it's actually "Crunch" Bandicot, voiced by Chris Williams) telling you what to do on occasions. He also introduces the levels - "Temple of Zoom", "A New Hop", and other such cringe-worthy (yet oddly amusing) jokes. You run and jump about, learning new moves and gaining new abilities as you go. You pick up "mojo" along the way, which can be just lying around, left by defeated enemies, obtained from plants (if you punch them!), and so forth. As you pass certain milestone amounts of mojo, your skills will increase, such as the amount of time you can spin before getting dizzy in a spin attack, etc.
The basic game is a lot of fun, with frequent changes of pace for boss levels, bits where you travel on your hoverboard, and secret locations you can be transported to for special challenges that yield loads of mojo if you can manage to do them. As you accomplish certain things through the levels, you will be able to unlock certain things such as information on characters, concept art, and the ability to replay these levels. Mojo earned through any level add to your total, so if you're really finding a level tough, you could always replay an earlier one until you've increased your skills. When you complete a level, you may be awarded a gold, silver or bronze medal, depending on whether you've achieved certain targets.
Much of the enjoyment you get from this game comes from the constant stream of new moves you can learn, and new monsters you can take over. The larger monsters can be taken over if you defeat them without destroying them, and these give you access to a range of new moves. Some monsters can only be damaged significantly by other monsters, and some have special abilities such as being able to shoot things. This is the only area where the Wiimote is really used apart from the pushing the buttons - while still controlling your character with the nunchuck, you aim your sights with the Wiimote. The game works well on the WII controllers, but the controllers certainly aren't used to the full in Crash of the Titans.
The graphics are pretty decent, very colourful and nicely animated, but still having that certain blurriness that blights so many WII games. Still, often you're moving at speeds that make this less of a problem! I'm sure that other systems have superior graphics, but they're certainly not bad enough here to detract from the gameplay. The music is a lot of fun too, and the sampled speech is very clear, with some excellent voice acting. One of the most enjoyable things about this game is the way the minion masters - easy to beat enemies of which there is a seemingly endless supply - talk to each other if they haven't seen you yet. Often their little conversations are very funny, as is their reaction to being attacked. They sometimes come out with completely bizarre and very funny expressions. Crash himself is also often funny, though this is more often what he does that what he says. If you try to push everything to the limit, expect to find yourself flattened against the wall or sprawled out on the floor quite regularly!
The game will take you quite a long time to finish, depending on how determined you are to get a gold medal for each level and win at each mojo room. As a one-player game it works well enough, but it comes into its element in 2-player mode. You can jump in and out of each other's backbacks, with control of the main character alternating every time you jump if you're not separate entities on the screen. The only thing I didn't like about this system was that it always threw you together when a hoverboard section came up - I would have much preferred both characters to retain control (even if it would likely make these sections more tricky). I had a few issues with the controls in terms of pressing something twice might make the menu come up or my player jump inside the backpack - the game developers clearly hadn't taken human nature into account when choosing the keys! (For example, you tend to repeatedly stab the same key if what you asked it to do hasn't happened... guess what? Up pops the menu... well, we could always try to change human nature I guess...)
The game world was large, but the style of the game didn't encourage exploration - you are fairly limited as to where you can go. In a sense this saves frustration as you always know where you need to go next, but this didn't really help the game to have an immersive atmosphere. The levels are well designed, with a good variety of timing/position/logic puzzles. The game is not particularly difficult to complete, but it's a lot of fun to play again and there is enough incentive in the way of unlockables to encourage replay.
Overall Crash of the Titans is a very fun game that'll keep you playing for quite some time. Though there's no reason to get the WII version particularly if you have more than one system, the WII version is more than satisfactory. The controllers could have been used more, but I didn't feel that this was a major minus-point in this instance.
Rated: 7+ (PEGI rating) for violence. It's cartoon violence and there's no gore.
Released by: Sierra Developed by: Radical Entertainment
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