Crash of the Titans

The most telling thing about this one is the verb: jacking. Ride an enemy's back, beat it into submission, and the mutant becomes your body for as long as you can keep it alive. Each Titan carries its own move set, its own reach, its own crude idea of what violence looks like, and the ape-like Rhinoroller plays nothing like the freezing Ratcicle or the tusked Shellephant. Crash himself, without a mount, is fragile and limited. That is the design speaking plainly.

Radical Entertainment took over the series here and rebuilt it from the ground up as a combat game with platforming attached rather than the reverse. Levels are wide, linear corridors punctuated by arena fights, and the currency of progress is Mojo, drained out of beaten enemies to upgrade Crash's own combo strings. Bandicoot fans who came for precise jumping across rotating platforms found something closer to a cartoon beat 'em up, and the reaction at the time was split down exactly that line. Nobody was neutral about it.

What carries the game is presentation. The art direction is genuinely strong, all thick outlines and lumpy silhouettes, closer to a Saturday morning special than the pre-rendered sheen of the Naughty Dog era, and the Titans are designed to read instantly at a glance. The writing leans hard on flippant comedy, with Cortex and his niece Nina bickering their way through a plot about a giant robot built out of stolen mutagen. Some of the jokes land. The recast voices, including a very different Crash, remain the thing longtime players complain about most.

On PlayStation 2 the game runs at a lower fidelity than its Xbox 360 sibling and the camera struggles in tight arenas, swinging behind scenery at the worst moments. Crowds of Titans can flatten the frame rate. A second player can drop in to help, which turns the tougher fights into something more forgiving and more chaotic at once. The combat itself is shallow by design, built on a handful of light and heavy strings, and it holds up mainly because the mounts keep changing the rules underneath you.

Seen from a distance, this is the point where a mascot platformer stopped trusting platforming to be enough. It is a fluent, good-looking action game with an inventive central hook, and it is also the sound of a long-running series quietly changing what it wanted to be.