A strange game that i got with my ps1 when i was a kid. It's like streets of rage had babies with donkey kong country's pre-rendered 2D/3D character sprites, and then throw in batman forever of course.

The game ranges confusingly in difficulty, if you play fairly normally, the game can get extremely difficult at times, but if you twirl you thumb over the d-pad and press one of the attack buttons, batman/robin will break into a spinning attack that basically kills everyone on screen, and you can cheese your way to the end of the game just about.

A really perfect example of all the worst elements of the 7th gen of video games.

- Linear cinematic story mode that you'll forget entirely after playing it.
- 3 hours long if that
- poor man's COD aesthetic ( brown, bloom, ironsights )
- heavy online emphasis that quickly becomes abandoned
- celebrity tie in ( red dawn writer )
- dlc, preorder bonuses etc.

I'm hoping this review will be of some help to anyone new to this game, or just curious. I'm refusing to put a star rating on this, as i don't think this is one of those games where it's useful.

I wanted to start by talking about the combat, it's one of the things that gets brought up immediately whenever you see this reviewed. I saw many people talking about how bad the combat was in this whenever i looked this up, and most likely, like me, when you read them you assumed this was your standard; "old survival horror games control bad wah wah wah".

When i started playing this, the combat, on first glance, is your standard survival horror stuff, it features silent hill style melee stuff, you hold a trigger and press a button, and your protag swipes left to right.

"Wow, really, this is what people were griping over?" i foolishly said, but all illusions are shattered upon reaching the first boss.

This game, hands down, has some of the worst hitboxes/collision detection i've ever encountered. You often can be hit by enemies facing away from you in this, and to make things worse, your character falls over from 90% of attacks, giving them time to hit you again.

Hearing this, you're probably thinking i hated this game. And i admit, when i encountered moments like this, i really had to fight the urge to give up.

However, i am one of the few people out there who actually owns a physical copy of this, call it weird, or sunk-cost-fallacy but i felt that actually being able to play through this on a physical copy, on the actual PS2 hardware, is a pretty rare thing that not everyone gets to experience. So i played on, and beat it.

This is all immensely helped by the fact that i have a big love for survival horror from this era, and how incredibly unique and interesting the style and story telling in this is, how hard the aesthetic and story telling beats hit. I really don't want to spoil it, and i encourage emulating (save states would really help), or watching a playthrough.

The soundtrack is the most distinctive thing i've ever heard, i've never seen a horror game do this style since, and it's honestly fantastic.

I could go on and on, but my main thrust is this:

This game is a real diamond in the rough. There's something extremely cool and groundbreaking in this, but you really have to persevere through some irritating gameplay to get to it. I don't feel comfortable rating this as some 5/10, or something, as it really doesn't do it justice. Numbers don't really communicate just how high the highs are, and how low the lows are in this.

Anyway, i hope this gets ported some day, with the hitboxes fixed.

A fantastic and generally underrated game, while it got fairly heavy praise at the time of release you can't help but feel the franchise got left behind a little for no good reason.

It deftly combines a fun story laden with melancholic humor and a cool burtonish atmosphere, the game dodges most of the common level tropes, and gives you a quest through a dark fantasy kingdom.

Great music, great replayability, great vibes.

It's kind of insane that this is one of the lowest rated games on here.

Complaining that the visuals are bad, or it feels clunkier than later titles is like watching a silent movie from the 1920s and complaining that there's no sound.

This thing was released jn 1994 when you basically had 3 3D fighting games to choose from. And at the time this was a massive improvement, featuring things that were new at the time that we now take for granted.

Context people, context.

In my humble opinion, one of the best games ever made.

In terms of just sheer variety of gameplay, story, visuals, style, it's hard to think of many games that match up with this.

There's a real magic to the way it bounces so effortlessly from 1930s gangster stuff in Chicago, to Gothic Undead Horror in 1800's Notre dame, to Sci-Fi Terminator-Future War. Each with it's own gameplay, music, visual look, array of time period correct weapons. In Chicago you'll meet an informant, bust up barrels of liquor, whereas in the robot factory you'll control laser-turret cameras, and fight a giant drill-armed machine boss. One is moody with a noir sort of jazz OST, and the other features pounding techno bass.

All this is held up with a tight responsive control scheme, a huge array of unlockable content, a side arcade league mode filled with bots to face off against, challenge mode content. But best of all a full comprehensive multiplayer, that practically never stops being fun.

I can easily return to this game whenever, it's perfect.

I like this one better than TS3, but less than TS2.

Great selection of levels/characters/weapons, including probably the best TS level of them all, Planet X.

While it's missing the story of it's sequels, the time trial element is actually really fun once you commit to it, i initially struggled with it growing up, but returning to it i finally got the knack.

At the time of it's release there was nothing quite like it.

Essentially the best giant-monster-based fighter of them all. It really captures what you want from a game with that premise. You can play as a nice variety of kaiju/monster archetypes, a godzilla, a mecha, giant ants from outer space type thing, an atomic robot, a big giant-ray harryhausen statue guy.

And gameplay wise it allows for climbing up giant skyscrapers, throwing buildings and vehicles around.

All matched up with a great atmosphere and visuals, it's aged very well.

Features a character create where you can make wrestlers invisible, or specific body parts/accessories invisible. Meaning you can turn Goldberg into Rayman.

Or, my personal favorite: Wrestle as a floating head, or floating pair of sunglasses.

Otherwise the game's a bit shit.

This was my first ps1 game. At the time i loved it, and despite my rating, i still sort of do. It blew me away at the time as it was the first game i ever played that featured a full 3D character that you guided through 3D environments, it also had a fighting game element which played to my Tekken love.

However. This game is easily one of the worst out there. It looks very bad, features many reused enemy models, spawn doesn't look right, environments are difficult to discern and show many visual bugs.
The gameplay is a mix of tomb-raider platforming and tekken-ish combat, both are awful. Spawn handles like a car, you have to sort of steer and brake as he moves. The combat is broken, despite simple special move inputs, you find yourself struggling to use them.
It features a jumping section in one of the medieval areas that is so frustrating that i haven't seen footage online of anyone completing it, they all cheat. It took my about 30 minutes to do that jump.
The story is non existent.
The music is pretty good.

Absolutely terrible.

Anyone who wants to understand game design should play this. On the surface, it looks and plays just like the first three, but spend a bit of time with it, and it falls apart very fast.

Story involves time travel again for no real reason, cortex creates a terrible budget-crash who uses elemental masks (very cliched), etc etc. Nothing special.

Visually everything looks kind of off. Crash's extra lives are janky 3D heads instead of the charming 2D art. Cortex's eyes are all fucked up, and his 'N' is too big. N Tropy looks all messed up, repeating assets from older games. Animation is much better on cutscenes in older games. Levels are kind of just repeated ideas from previous games visually.

Gameplay is unforgivable. Levels are too widely spaced, meaning 90% of enemies can just be walked around, so many enemies in this just stand harmlessly throwing stuff into the middle of what is essentially a massive motorway.

You fight the same boss every time, Crunch with a new flavor added on. The flame-mask one in particular stood out as really dumb. Where you just ran back and forward chasing each other with a pathetic looking water pistol in some non-descript pathway.

Vehicles all handle in a really poor way, especially the aliens-power loader thing, which i audibly groaned at everytime it made an appearance.

Can you tell i hated every second of this?

Easily the worst crash game, i played them all in order, and i've gotta say, the latter entries after this are much more tolerable, as much as they miss the mark.

A true companion-piece to Spyro Enter the Dragonfly.