Funnily enough, Crash Bandicoot 4.
I love the game too. It's the disappointment of Crash getting revived just to gain this false identity of being "the Dark Souls of Platformers" and Toys for Bob running off of that instead of tight level design. I agree with the fanbase that no dev that handled Crash after Naughty Dog understood their formula but for me they didn't have to. Every dev that had Crash prior to the series getting killed by Activision had something in mind with the franchise and did their best to make it unique, and that's what made me fall in love with the series as a kid. Every game felt different.
Crash 4 feels as if they really tried to ride off of the Naughty Dog trilogy without actually understanding what made it good compared to other games of the time, and so they tried to do that, while also catering to the big fans that are gonna point and say "Oh, I remember Oxide, and the Evil Twins." Half of these references aren't even done in cool ways. My boys Victor and Moritz got assigned to being a portrait of them in Cortex Castle and they just have some of the speaking characters say some instantly recognizable line, like N. Brio once again yapping about how no one takes him seriously as he lays an egg.
The level design is awful. They introduced a mechanic where you can move the camera a bit to see off in the distance, and areas where you need to use it still don't actually help you see whether or not something is hidden. And God, the hidden items and boxes. They put them in the absolute dumbest places just to artificially increase the difficulty. The originals had levels like Cold Hard Crash in 2 where there's a single box hidden above the camera, but where it's at even if you miss it once or twice they put it in a spot where you can be like "Oh, maybe there's something up there."
It's as if Toys for Bob saw that and tried to do that to a larger scale, without realizing that the game is still for kids. And that's the big problem. Why make a kid's game so hard and involved? Having to get all of the gems, which there are 12 to a level now, forcing you to play the level twice due to the new N.Verted mechanic, finish a level without dying to get the N.Sanely Perfect relics, collect all of the Flashback Tapes so you can play those levels, collect the 5 Color Gems that they no longer tell you which levels they are actually in, which they patched in later, collect all of the Time Trial Relics, which you are now forced to get Platinum to 106% whereas in the old games you only needed Gold, play the bosses twice, and a few others I'm blanking on right now.
The biggest disappointment isn't even the game itself. It's the developers. Activision hit it out of the park with N.Sane Trilogy, even if some hardcore fans don't agree. They successfully revived the franchise. And why was that? They had Vicarious Visions handle that remake, which VV had prior experience with the franchise. They made Crash Nitro Kart and the GBA games, which were good except for Crash Purple/Spyro Orange. So they kinda already understood what they needed to do. Toys for Bob on the other hand prior to Spyro Reignited and Crash 4 were known for garbage shovelware titles, and being a COD support dev, and Crash 4 was the first real big solo project they had. They just very obviously didn't get it from the start, and now with Crash Team Rumble they kinda put Crash back into his moldy grave. I'd be surprised if we ever get another Crash game under Activision.
Crash Bandicoot 5 was in development in 2023, Toys for Bob still being the lead, but that game seemed to be a lot better conceptually. It would have been a crossover game with Spyro, with Crash and Spyro working together to stop Ripto and Cortex (kinda like a better version of the aforementioned bad GBA games) and they had levels where they were solo or together with Crash riding Spyro like he does the wild hog and Polar. It got cancelled for Black Ops 6. RIP my G.O.A.T once again.
