Reviews
Crash Bandicoot has been around for many, many years. Over this time his name has been put to many titles in not only platforming but also Kart racing. Whilst the Crash games have also had solid gameplay and are genuinely fun experiences, they have never been unique or brought anything new to the table. Last years game, Crash of The Titans attempted to change this by allowing crash to commandeer mutants. These mutants all brought unique abilities to the table that helped Crash achieve his goal of overthrowing the evil Nina Cortex. Whilst it was a nice change, you could only use the mutants in certain places before being forces to leave them behind on order to progress. Crash: Mind Over Mutant aims to change this by giving you more control over the mutants and allowing you to utilize them in ways that were not previously possible.
One of the new features that allows you to take mutants to new heights is the ability to store one of them in your pocket for later use. Whilst the mutants can now actively jump and scale walls with ledges, there are still a level spots where mutants cannot progress, where you will be required to dismount them to continue. This is where the new feature comes in really handy as once you clear the gap you simple tap RB to get the mutant out your pocket and it is once again at your disposal. It would have been nice to have the ability to store more than one mutant in your pocket as often an area will require you to use numerous different mutants. This is fine in some cases as you can hot swap between the mutant stored in your pocket and the one you are currently riding. This does become a problem when you reach the mentioned areas that the mutants cannot clear as you will need to leave one of them behind. In addition to gaps and jump walls, other areas that the mutants cannot clear are climbing walls and they do have some clipping issues with sideways ledge jumps. This is rather annoying and a shame that a mutant has problems scaling a wall that Crash can easily jump up.
The levels of Crash are highly colourful and contain your standard platform puzzels and troubleshooting elements. These are kept basic as Crash is ultimately a kids game, but the puzzles do spice up the gameplay. Level design works for most of the game but there are some annoying moments that almost break the game. There was one instance where a portion of the level looked like a half pipe. Once in the half pipe Crash was stuck and could not get out either side. The only way to escape was to cheat the level by riding a mutant and gradually jumping up the curve of the half pipe. You see everytime you jump you can use the block button to pause the mutant in its tracks before repeating the same process until you have escaped. No doubt this will result in many people resuming from previous save points as this will be too hard or they will not work it out. Radical Entertainment most likley have these level sections so that you can come back at a later time as a mutant with the rolling ability, but it is poorly implemented that you can not only access these areas before the planned time, but also get stuck in them.
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