As I was out of Mario Party to play (at least of ones I could acquire cheaply, easily, and stream to Discord were concerned), a friend of mine recommended this game to me. I had never even heard of Crash Bash (or Cash Bandicoot Carnival, as we call it over here), but as luck had it, we actually had a copy available locally for cheap, so I snapped it right up. I was very curious to see what Sony’s attempt at this formula was, even if it wasn’t actually made by Naughty Dog themselves. Though I have certainly given my friend an earful for pushing me towards this in the first place, I eventually conquered the trial and tribulation and saw this game through to the end of its story mode. The game doesn’t keep track of play time, but I reckon it took me 7 or 8 hours at least to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware playing as Crash.

The story setup for CB is kinda weird, but ultimately not super important. Aku Aku (the good totem fella) and Uka Uka (the evil totem fella) are arguing in their little hangout in the heavens about who among them is better. They decide to determine it once and for all by summoning representatives from down on Earth to duke it out in a series of games (and since there are way more bad guys than good guys, Aku Aku is allowed to take two bad guys for two even teams of four). Whomever you pick will need to fight and win their way through four worlds of games and beat the bosses at the end in order to see your team the winner. It’s not ultimately a very important story, given the genre of game it is, but it’s cool that they went through all of the trouble to design and craft the cutscenes for it, as they’re charming in that very Crash Bandicoot-y way that the PS1 titles so often had. It’s a more than adequate premise for the gameplay at hand to take place, and it does its job well.

Though this was recommended to me because of all of the Mario Party I was playing, it is decidedly not really much of a Mario Party clone as such. It’s more like Microsoft’s Fusion Frenzy, in that it’s a competitor to Mario Party via being a party game based around mini-games rather than outright trying to do its own spin on the Mario Party formula like Sega’s Sonic Shuffle. In each world, there are a series of games you need to win in order to get the trophy from that game, and you’ll need the trophy from all 22 games in order to see the credits. Be the first to win that game 3 times among you and the CPUs, and you’ve got yourself a trophy. Then, after the trophy, you’ve got a diamond and a power crystal (in very Crash Bandicoot fashion) to win as well, with certain numbers of each being needed to unlock boss fights. The diamond is generally gotten by winning a round within a time limit, and the power crystal is gotten by winning a round under some kind of challenge mode or handicap. There are eventually ankhs to win from each as well, which usually just involve winning normal rounds consecutively, but they’re only required for unlocking post-game content (which I didn’t really bother with).

It’s a fine enough formula, but the mini-games themselves are the real problem here. World 1 has 4 games, 2 has 5, and so on and so forth. The way this actually works isn’t just about numbers though. Each successive world has one totally new kind of game, with the others being new spins on the games that the last world had. This means that if you’re like me and you despise the 4-player pong game that’s in the running since world 1, you’re gonna keep on playing versions of that over and over if you wanna see the credits. A lot of my complaints here ultimately are only important if you’re playing the single-player mode, but given that the PS1 only has 2 controller slots natively, most people who are playing this are going to be doing it without a multi-tap, so they’re going to have some computers to deal with. The computers are just too unbalanced in too many games.

This is especially true for the pong game (including the boss fight based on it), but too many games are just too random in either their execution or difficulty balance to actually feel all that fun when you’re forced to be the first to win 3 rounds. It even feels like there’s an internal difficulty switch at times that will just dynamically make the CPUs go from playing nearly perfectly to utterly embarrassingly after you lose enough times. I imagine this wouldn’t be quite so bad for a party game with a bunch of friends, but as a single-player experience, it is a terribly frustrating experience. The boss fights are just versions of the normal mini-games but modified to be fights against bosses from the Crash trilogy. They’re usually okay, and they mercifully have checkpoints, but the good bits they do have are not nearly enough to offset how frustrating the normal mini-games can be (especially with how miserable the final boss’ pong section is).

The presentation is quite good, but nothing super special. I wanna say most if not all of the assets are just taken from the original Crash trilogy games and modified with new animations or some new models here and there, so it’s a very familiar feeling thing. The arenas for the games themselves are usually okay, if nothing impressive, but quite a few suffer from some significant camera issues where it’s just too hard to see yourself too often. The music is very forgettable, but it fits the games its in well enough I suppose.

Verdict: Not Recommended. I suppose on a desert island with friends, if this was all you had for entertainment, you could get by on it, but as a single-player experience, Crash Bash made me wanna do nothing but bash crash my head through my desk XP. Not nearly enough time and attention was paid to polishing the games to make them actually fun and balanced, and the whole product suffers for it as a result. A special shout out to my friend ButtercupBandito for recommending this to me, but I’m afraid I don’t think I’ll ever be picking up Crash Bash for any reason again other than to sell it back to the Book Off I bought it from XP

Crash Bash offers something different from the platforming normalcy we're accustomed to with our favorite marsupial. Instead, it has a small collective of mini-games such as a pinball-air hockey hybrid and a pogo stick block-coloring one.

It's a lot of fun at the start but the novelty does wear off when you decide to grind, even with all the little variants at play to spice things up. Surely, a game like this shines when you play with friends and the chaos unfolds.

As a single-player affair, it's nothing special so when you're on your own, the other Crash offerings are more worthwhile (like the mainline or racing games). This game is really, for lack of a better parallel, its own rendition of Mario Party.

A fun experience with friends, but alone a troubling RNG journey that can really bend your patience.

After being a big supporter for many years for Crash Bash. I finally decided to sit down and attempt a start to finish play through on my own since I was a kiddo. I tried and I caved near the end.

The grind to get trophies in the mini games winds up feeling like a chore. Half of the games are paced poorly or rely heavily on RNG elements to either cripple or enhance your chances.

In the later warp rooms I don’t really feel that my skills are being tested, but my will to have fun and push to the end. This recent play through was a harsh reminder that nostalgia is a hell of a drug and everyone was right. CTR is much better than Bash.

It does however have some solid mini games like crates, tanks, and the polar levels. However, the experience is highly recommended in co-op or a group.