Como fazer um novo Crash Bandicoot sem a Naughty Dog? Simples, é só pegar o último trabalho deles e tentar fazer igual, afinal, aquela deve ser a fórmula do sucesso! Assim nasce The Wrath of Cortex, o jogo com a responsabilidade de continuar o legado da adorada franquia de plataforma em uma nova geração.

Uma nova geração! Mas ironicamente, esse até então era o jogo mais feio da série, animações esquisitas, fases escuras e modelos pobres, apresentando um Crash sem expressões que lembrem o apelo cartunesco da franquia, são poucos os momentos que WOC consegue ser visualmente interessante. Em compensação, sua trilha sonora é bem atraente em boa parte dos níveis.

É lamentável como Wrath of Cortex não traz absolutamente nenhuma evolução em relação aos jogos anteriores, algumas mecânicas (como rasteira + giro) foram até removidas, o jogo inteiro parece uma skin feia de Crash 3. Houve a introdução do Crunch e das máscaras elementais, que sinceramente, deixam o jogo ainda mais chato levando em conta que dessa forma o boss é sempre o mesmo, enquanto os verdadeiros chefões da saga viraram minions genéricos em algumas fases. A novidade mais relevante é que agora a Coco protagoniza algumas fases a pé, a jogabilidade dela é super limitada, ela não pode dar rasteira e não recebe nenhum upgrade durante o jogo, mas até que é divertido controlar ela fora de um veículo pela primeira vez na franquia.

E haja veículos! Desde o primeiro jogo, esse tipo de fase foi aparecendo cada vez mais, talvez tenham dado uma estrapolada no terceiro jogo, mas a variedade na jogabilidade era divertida. Em WOC a variedade aumentou muito, e junto trouxe algumas fases horríveis (por favor, Crash, nunca mais entre em um submarino). Eu gosto dessa quantidade de mecânicas diferentes, mas aqui nem sempre a jogabilidade é boa e definitivamente exageraram na dose ao ponto de você sentir falta das fases comuns.

No fim, The Wrath of Cortex é suportável, foi o último jogo 3D da franquia no molde dos clássicos (até o recente ressurgimento), e apesar de ser inferior aos seus antecessores em todos os aspectos, da pra se divertir. Além disso, ele deixou explícito o quão importante a Naughty Dog era pra série, e que dificilmente Crash Bandicoot voltaria a ter a mesma relevância e carisma de antes.

7/10

The most underrated Crash game by a country mile. Buttery smooth 60fps, a pleasant aesthetic with fluid animations and some genuinely fun and creative level design (shout out to the safari jeep level). It was no small task taking over the mantle from Naughty Dog, and Traveller's Tales did an admirable job given the short dev time they had. I personally had a better time with this than Warped, and it's far better than the entries that came after. Unless you're playing the version with the ten hour long loading screens, I don't see why this game gets so much hate. The dark horse of the franchise.

For the first mainline Crash game developed by a studio other than Naughty Dog and having a grand total of 12 months to work on it, the end result is a game that is exceptional at how wildly inconsistent it is. The developers must have had a hard on for the gimmicks for Crash 3, because they literally threw everything they could into this: water levels, using a shapeship, driving a Jeep, using a mech suit, the list literally goes on. I wouldn't mind most of this if it wasn't for the fact that these gimmicks make-up over half of the game's levels and also didn't suck so bad. Add that with how so many levels overstay their welcome and performance issues that are persistent through the game's runtime (You can never talk about this game without mentioning the infamous load times on the original PS2 version). The platforming levels themselves are slightly above average best and incredibly underwhelming at worst, as some stages like Wizards and Lizards are actually fairly fun and varied while others like Compactor Reactor and Jungle Rumble have static enemies and large areas that have nothing interesting to test the player's platforming skills.

The last 10 stages or so really show some pretty bad crunch game design, as you're essentially battling the game's bad collision detection and awkward controls in many of the gimmick segments, such as the first instance of the mech being used for platforming in the abysmal Droid Void. Speaking of Droid Void, that stage pretty much has everything I hate about this game: a phenomenally boring beginning part that has probably the slowest climbing animation I've seen ever (seriously, did they not realize that Crash could climb monkey bars at a much faster speed in the previous games?), followed by the first use of the mech suit in a platforming stage that has a cannon that can't aim for jack and you still die in one hit with for whatever reason. Also, The sneaking shoes are the most pointless power-up in the history of power-ups. You just use it to sneak across a pile of Nitro crates. This especially becomes completely pointless when you can eventually just double-jump and then use the death tornado spin to get a ton of air time across said crates.

While I get that this game came out in 2001, its presentation hasn't particularly aged the best, and in a lot of ways it looks very unpolished compared to even the original trilogy of games. This is especially evident by a 10 minute long intro cutscene featuring really stiff animations and models of all the characters from Crash 3. In general the game doesn't really look that great, especially with environments that, while bigger than previous games, have noticeably far less detail and just aren't that great to look at in general. If there is one thing I will commend the game for, it'd be the surprisingly great soundtrack. Seriously, if there was only one reason I'd ever come back to this game, it'd be because of this soundtrack that actually bops pretty hard.

In closing, at its best, Wrath of Cortex is a very average Crash game, and at its worst, it's a mess of game gimmicks that tries too hard to be different just for the sakes of being different. In the end though, it's a fairly disappointing follow-up to Crash 3.
Also, never thought I'd hear Lee Ermey voice a character in a Crash game.