168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Team Rumble has been a long time coming. The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:N.Sane Trilogy's return back in 2017 was supposed to herald a brave new dawn for the once legendary mascot, and for a while things were going well. Crash Team Racing and Nitro Kart were mashed together into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nitro Fueled, another success, and then came Crash 4: It's About Time. All three of these games were made by different studios, and all three were soon pushed away from Crash or anything with passion behind it into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty. Crash Team Rumble, known in the whispers of the rumour mill as Wumpa Lea🥂gue, was dead. Toys For Bob, awarded for its work on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spyro's trilogy and Crash 4 with CoD, might as well have been dead with it, crushed in the gears of gun skin manufacture. Now Team Rumble and Toys For Bob have been brou🦂ཧght back to life. Isn't it sad that they shouldn’t have bothered?
I adore Crash Bandicoot. The first game was the first ever video game I played, and I have stuck with the orange marsupial through thick and thin. But things have never been this thin. Crash has had bad games in the past, I know. But they've always felt like Crash Bandicoot games. They've always had a shared goal, gameplay philosophy, and identity, even if it was obscured by horrendous tribal tattoos. Crash Team Rumble has none of this. It has none of anything.
I know Crash Team Racing wasn't originally a Crash game either, but it was so alive with passion and creativity. Crash Team Rumble is not. The story goes that Toys For Bob saw this as a passion project, but I struggle to see how the studio that brought Spyro back to life and injected Crash 4 with so many ideas was driven by wanting to make a basic MOBA with no characterisation, narrative, or personality. The most vibrant we see Crash is in the loading screen for the studio’s own logo.
Enough with the complaints. Let's get to why. First off, it's a very thin interpretation of the MOBA genre. Each team has only one scoring zone each, while collecting wumpa fruits is a pedestrian exercise that never takes advantage of each character's unique charm. In each map, you can collect relics to give smaller perks (not at all how relics work in any other game, where they are time trial rewards), or jump on gems (again, not how they work) to give team boosts. It's the most basic version of a MOBA, and there's nothing added on top of it.
The maps are so small and constricted that the only difference is aesthetic, and even then, barely. Despite the rich variety of levels the Crash series has had over the years, the nine maps (a decent enough number) feel too similar to each other, and it's tough to match them all up to their inspirations. Each has some unique perks, but these don't always tie into the theme and the only real range is a disappointing difference in usefulness of these perks across maps.
Speaking of disappointing differences, there are three basic roles in the game: characters who score points, Scorers; characters who unlock perks, Boosters; and characters who defend the goal, Blockers. Only the third one is worthwhile. All three types of characters can do all three things - as a Blocker, I often defended and unlocked the perk pads rather than the goal - but if you don't defend well, you lose. Most of the games I won by a distance through playing as a Blocker by virtue of being the only one who played that role properly, and the ones I lost were when the other Blocker was better than me. I know MOBAs have roles and these roles get tweaked, but right now, the games are dull slugfests that take it even further away from its Crash Bandicoot roots.
I think the game is aware of this too - you start off with three characters, one for each category. Crash scores, Coco boosts, and Dingodile blocks. You then earn badges by scoring points, stepping on gems, and defending the goal, with these badges unlocking other characters. It takes 15 badges to unlock all Scorers, includ✨ing the new Catbat, who is certainly a chara♑cter that is there. Moving on. It also takes 15 badges to unlock all of the Boosters, yet 50 to unlock the last Blocker (Lady N. Tropy, who is worth it as much as anything in this game is worth it), but it's strange to counterbalance the lopsided game design so flimsily. In a final nod to the shoddy state, the descriptions are inconsistent between characters, with some asking for Blocking Medals, and others for 'medals from Blocking'.
This brings us onto the whole battle pass system. Right now, there's no store, just a linear progression to unlock rewards. Not rewards you'd ever want, but still rewards. However, we saw this with Crash Team Racing at launch too, so in time, I am sure there will be an in-game store aimed at further milking the bandicoot dry - N.Gin a🅠nd Ripper Roo are conspicuously absent for now. Crash Team Racing at least gave us monthly Grand Prix events that offered incentives and constant updates to keep going. Given Team Rumble can't even muster that right at the start, it's going to be spinning the wheels if it expects this to last longer term.
If you love Crash Bandicoot and you've been waiting years for what once was Wumpa League, there's probably just enough there to convince you that this is a good game. But it's not. It's a bad game. They shouldn't have made Crash Bandicoot into this thing, and deep down all of us know it.
Score: 2/5. A PS5 code was provided by the publisher for this review.
Crash Team Rumble brings the storied series to the MOBA genre, developed by Toys for Bob. In it, you'll form teams of four players, selecting from a range of characters before aiming to collect more Wumpa Fruit than your opponent. It features cross-platform play, and different character roles and abilities.