Crash Bandicoot - The Wrath of Cortex

The loading. That is what anyone who played this on a PS2 in 2001 remembers first, and it is worth naming up front because it shaped how the game felt: a warp room, a level select, and then a wait long enough to put the pad down. Later ports trimmed it. The original never did.

Which is a shame, because underneath the stutter is a competent piece of work. Traveller's Tales took over from Naughty Dog and made the sensible, unadventurous choice of rebuilding Crash Bandicoot 3 with better textures. The hub is a warp room. The levels alternate between corridor runs seen from behind, side-scrolling stretches and vehicle stages. Crystals unlock the bosses, gems and time-trial relics reward the players who care about the routes rather than the finish line. Aku Aku still floats alongside you and still counts to three.

The new idea is Crunch, a lab-grown bandicoot Cortex powers with four elemental masks, and the bosses are built around each one in turn. It is a tidy structure and it gives the vehicle sections a reason to exist: the Atlasphere hamster-ball courses, the jeep chases, the underwater and aerial detours. Some of these are genuinely enjoyable. Several are not, and the game asks you to replay them for relics whether you liked them or not.

What holds up is the platforming when the camera stays behind Crash and the level does one clear thing at a time. The jump and spin still feel right, the crate chains still read as puzzles at speed, and the difficulty curve is fairer than the PS1 games ever were. What has aged is everything around it: a plot delivered in stiff cutscenes, hit detection on some vehicle stages that punishes precision, and an overall sense of a team executing someone else's design document faithfully.

It is the sound of a mascot changing hands without anyone wanting to admit it.