Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is pretty much an improvement over the original in almost every single way.

The level designs and aesthetics are more varied and fun, providing the player with a good challenge, but I believe levels never become quite as hard as Crash 1, which allows this game to be more beginner-friendly, in my opinion.

Crash now has a new move, that being the slide! Doing a slide jump in this game is very satisfying, especially when you're trying to do longer jumps, or when you're just casually running through the stage!
Additionally, Crash also has the Belly Flop, which is performed by pressing the slide button after a jump, and I think it's fine. I found it useful for breaking my momentum in the middle of a jump, but I don't find it as reliable as something like the Stomp in the Boost Sonic games.

I think the bosses are a bit better than last time, not by much, but they are fun to fight, as simple as they may be.
Additionally, there's a bit more story this time around.
I didn't really discuss this during my Crash 1 review, but the plot of last time was that Crash was a failed experiment by Dr. Neo Cortex, and that he escaped the lab, but his girlfriend Tawna, is still stuck in there, and Crash has got to save her from Cortex and stop him from taking over the world with his army of animal experiments.
This time around, Tawna is nowhere to be seen (I wonder why) and Crash has a younger sister named Coco. She doesn't do much in the story, mainly just trying to warn Crash of Cortex's actual plan, which is pretty obvious to see, but considering that Crash is a big dumbass... yeah. Cortex is using Crash to get all crystals, the plot McGuffin of this game, to power up the Cortex Vortex and rule over the world!

The biggest glow-up, I'd say, has got to be the voice acting. Now, in the original game, voice acting was minimal and we didn't hear many characters talking, but when they did... it was meh. Nothing bad per say, but nothing really good either.
This time around, there are more cutscenes, and we hear more of Dr. Cortex, this time being voiced by Clancy Brown, and I love how much character he gives to the mad scientist, it's great!

And that also applies to the game's overall presentation, as the graphics look slighty better, especially Crash's model, and the music is more catchy than the original. Not all of it is memorable, but there are some pretty good tracks in here.

This time around, I actually decided to go for 100% completion, being the first time I ever 100%'d a Crash game, and while it is generally a better experience than the original, but not having to worry about dying, there's probably way more backtracking here than last time.
Now, Crash 1 had its backtracking moments, especially with the colored gems, but this time around, not only can you get a gem by breaking all of the boxes, but also by doing something different, and this is where the Death Routes come into play!

Not all stages have a Death Route, and not all secondary gems require you do a Death Route, but a Death Route is an alternate route of a stage that you get by not dying up to that point. The thing is, a good chunk of stages that have Death Route have boxes in said route and in the main route, which requires a bunch of backtracking and fighting against the game's locked camera to break every box in the stage and get one of the gems.

While this game is an improvement over the original in many aspects, this was the pits, and not really that fun.
But I will admit, I did smile when I finally got 100% completion, especially because it was my first time doing so.

Overall, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is a great sequel to the original, improving on a lot, but still has a couple of snags holding it back from being the best it could be.

After beating the Japanese version of Crash 1 on stream last week, this week I beat the Japanese version of Crash 2 on stream~. It took a little longer, at more like a little over 4 hours, but that extra time was moslty due to messing around trying to get full completion on levels as I went through them. I then spent another 4-5 hours getting 100% in the game. It was an experience I won't soon forget, but also one I'll probably not soon repeat. At any rate, it was an entertaining use of a Sunday XD

Crash 2 picks up almost literally where Crash 1 leaves us: with Cortex's little flying bike having JUST been blown up by Crash and him plummeting towards the ground. In an underground cave he comes across a crystal (localized to Japanese as "power stones), and hatches a plot most evil(?). The plot then jumps forward a year as Cortex is working with N. Jin in an orbiting space station that is being powered by the crystal. Cortex needs the other 25 power crystals out there in order to power his Cortex Vortex and "save the world." But with none of his henchmen on the planet anymore, he kidnaps Crash's sister to manipulate him into helping him. Of course, all is not as it seems, and Cortex actually is going to take over the world with his machine, not save it, and you need to defeat him. However, upon his defeat, the orbiting Cortex Vortex stays in tact, and you need to collect all 42 diamonds (100%-ing the game) in order to see it finally destroyed.

The story is campy, silly set dressing for a platformer game, and it's good fun. The returning characters and new characters have a lot of personality to them despite many only having a few (if any) lines of dialogue (such as my personal favorite, Pola the baby polar bear <3), and the character design is on-point as usual for the series. Aside from the more obvious addition of this game going to being fully voice-acted where the original was just text, it also has some extra cutscenes and voice lines that weren't in the original. Most of this surrounds Crash's sister Coco, who in the English version has her transmissions to Crash as mostly garbled noise, but in the Japanese version has totally understandable sentences and even one entirely new bit of expository dialogue near the end. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it's worth mentioning that it's there. Aside from that and the continued use of Aku Aku as a tutorial-giving machine upon pickup, the changes to the game compared to the English versions are very slight and come down to small technicalities around presentation or bug fixes. Crash 2 in Japanese is nearly identical mechanically to its English-language counterparts compared to how radically different Crash 1 is in Japanese.

Mechanically, you're going through 25 stages (and a few hidden stages) and 5 boss fights to defeat Cortex in a very similar way to the first game but with some major improvements. Crash moves far more fluidly, and you can even use a dual-shock controller to get even a little more control than that. I found myself swapping between the D-pad and analog stick when things called for more/less precision, but it's a really nice feature to have. Crash himself controls a bit better than the first game, and the level design is on the whole more solid and far more fair, despite the crystal collecting feeling a little bit like a tacked-on mechanic more than something meaningful (you'll need to replay the stage if you miss it). Speaking of fair, the game also has a hub area between stages instead of a Donkey Kong Country-style world map, and this area lets you save and load your game WHENEVER. After the first game limited save points exclusively to the end of bonus levels, this is an absolute god-send of a mechanical change. The changes aren't that numerous on paper, but the kinder level design (although not much less steep difficulty curve, frankly) and new save system add up to make this game a far more fun time than the first for just playing through it casually.

Going for 100% completion is also far more easy than the first game, mostly because in the first game if you died ONE TIME in a stage, you needed to redo the whole thing or you wouldn't be able to get all of the boxes needed to get the diamond on that stage. In this game, you maintain boxes between deaths if you hit a checkpoint, which makes going for everything far easier. However, going for 100% completion is still a proper miserable time at many points. Like the first game, this game really pushes what it could possibly expect the player to do to get 100% completion, and that includes but isn't limited to: finding invisible warp points to hidden stages, learning a level in the dark because you run out of enough light to break all the boxes in time, backtracking towards the camera in a forward-directed level to go down a different fork in the road to get more boxes you missed, and more! The game feels very vindictively designed for anyone wanting to go towards 100% completion.

After I announced that I'd beaten the game this way in the Slack chat, MrPopo asked me if it had been worth it, and I can safely say now as I did then, I don't think it was XP. Crash 2 is best enjoyed just playing it normally, and I'd only recommend going for 100% if you REALLY love the game and have nothing else you could possibly be doing XD

Verdict: Recommended. I'm not sure I can quite give it a highly recommended, since overall I don't feel like I liked this game THAT much better than the first game, but it's still a really significant improvement. Certainly compared to the English version, Crash 2 will likely be a far more enjoyable time than the first game, but it still hits a lot of the same awkward pitfalls the first game does in regards to awkwardness of the camera, the 3D-ish environments, and the controls from time to time. It's a fine time if you can pick it up for cheap-ish, but it will probably be best enjoyed by those who already like challenging platformers.