Activision has finally announced Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, the first brand-new game in the classic series in well over ten years. As if that wasn't exciting enough, it's being billed as the sequel to 1998's Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped - both in terms of story and gameplay.
This is pretty much a dream come true for every single kid who grew up with those first three Naughty Dog games on PlayStation. While the character has had a slight redesign, it pretty much looks like the Crash we all know and love. Check out the trailer below.
As previous rumours suggested, development is being handled by Toys For Bob, who led work on the Spyro trilogy remasters. They also assisted with 2017's Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy... so the team knows what makes the fuzzy orange lad tick.
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"It's been 12 years since the last new Crash game," Toys For Bob co studio head Paul Yan told us."Technically, this game is the eighth in the line. But we're very deliberately calling this game Crash 4: It's About Time. And we're calling it Crash 4 because we're positioning this game as a true sequel to the first three games developed by Naughty Dog."
Crash 4 takes place right after the climatic events of Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, because I know y'all were dying to see what happened next there. Oh, and the game being called It's About Time? That's not just a clever reference to how long we've all waited for a new game. Crash 4 is quite literally about time. That's like, far out, man.
"Dr. Neo Cortex, Dr. Entropy, and Uka Uka have been stranded on this distant planet, and they've finally found a way to escape," Yan explains.
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"In doing so they've ripped this huge hole in the fabric of time and space. And distorted the dimensions in a really catastrophic way. So Crash and Coco, it's really up to them to restore order and balance to the multiverse. And they're going to be doing that in Crash 4 by reuniting the four Quantum Masks that tie and hold everything together."
The aforementioned Quantum Masks will play a big role in the gameplay of Crash 4, as well as the story. Just as Aku Aku gave Crash the ability to take more hits from enemies in the original games, the Quantum Masks will kit our friend out with all-new powers. These masks can be found across the game's linear levels, and serve as temporary powerups.
Yan told us about the Time Mask (Kupuna-Wa) and the Gravity Mask (Ika-Ika). The other two masks, for now, will remain under wraps. The Time Mask gives Crash the power to slow down time and navigate obstacles that would have previously been impossible to overcome.
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The Gravity Mask, meanwhile, lets our hero manipulate gravity and walk upside down to get where he needs to be. Various challenges have been crafted specifically with these powerups in mind, so we should come across some pretty wacky obstacles over the course of our new journey.
The focus is clearly on finding ways to breathe new life into the structure of the original Crash games while preserving the spirit of the originals. As you probably saw from the trailer, Crash 4 really looks like it'll play exactly like the original trilogy, with narrow, linear levels that the bandicoot has to navigate by running away from the screen
But what about the difficulty? If there's one thing that the N.Sane Trilogy reminded us of, it's that early Crash was brutally difficult - though not always because it was well-designed. I'm not sure if I want the new game to be as unrelentingly fiendish as its predecessors, but a healthy amount of challenge is no bad thing. The good news is that TFB seems to want to strike a balance between difficulty and accessibility, which sounds like a positive thing to me.
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"We're not looking at trying to water [the difficulty] down," Yan explained. "I think one of the core things about the about Crash's classic gameplay is that it is a precision platformer.
"Difficulty is something that we absolutely consider. As we put a modern lens onto things, we want to make sure that the ramp is very clear, and that the format of the game is conducive, so that the lessons that you've learned from one level really apply next to the other.
"We want to preserve everything that fans have loved about the Crash games, but also make it more approachable and make sure that the experience can flow better from one level to the next."
The trailer also teased a number of new features that should help the game feel fresh, including wall-running, grinding, massive bosses, rope-swings and all kinds of cool new tricks for our hero to master.
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Oh, and there are separate playable characters besides Crash. Coco is back, as you'd expect, but what's really interesting is that we'll be able to play as Neo Cortex himself - he'll even have his own abilities and specially designed puzzles.
"Neo Cortex is really special," Yan said. "He has completely different abilities. He lacks a double jump, but he makes up for that by having this incredible horizontal dash. And he has a special ray gun, mad scientist that he is.
"He's also able to turn enemies in front of him or hazards into platforms into static ones or into bouncy ones. And so the types of levels that are constructed specifically for a neocortex are a little bit more puzzly. You're going to have to think about when to turn enemies into a platform and what type of platform that it's going to be necessary to get past."
It all sounds pretty great, and TFB seems super passionate about stepping up to what has to be one of the studio's biggest challenges to date. After all, working on a sequel to a successful game is one thing... but working on a sequel to a beloved 20-year-old trilogy from one of the most acclaimed studios in the world? Yikes.
"Pressure is one thing for sure," Yan said. " But I think we're incredibly honoured to take on this legacy."
"I mean, if you think about some of the top most recognisable characters in gaming history Crash is way up there on that list. So we know and recognise that fans have a lot of expectations for this character and have a lot of love... and I think we've really benefited from seeing these remasters show up, we've gotten the reception coming out of that recently.
"We're able to get a pulse on the community about what people appreciate about the games that we can react to now as opposed to trying to draw up on memories of what the game was."
Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time is headed to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 2nd.
Featured Image Credit: ActivisionTopics: Crash Bandicoot, PlayStation, Activision, Naughty Dog