Crash Feedback/Review (SPOILERS)

[Veritas]

Just finished the DLC. I think I was at 90ish% completion. I enjoyed it overall but wanted to leave some feedback. If it helps, I had 100% completion in Supraland.

- While Supraland felt like a big, proper puzzle-vania, Crash felt like a much more linear romp. My favorite parts of Supraland were exploring optional areas and collecting upgrades to make myself feel stronger (in both combat and exploration). I assume this was entirely because it was meant to be structured like DLC meant for post-game - I hope though that this isn't what's in store for Supraland 2. From what I've read that doesn't seem to be the case, as a combat designer is being hired.

- Please, please please add an option to skip each line of dialogue. Many of the pauses were way too long.

- I played Supraland when it first came out so it's been a long while. Naturally I've forgotten stuff that takes muscle memory, like which weapons go in which slot. The fact that you first get the teleportation launcher first, and that it's in the 3rd (4th?) slot is pretty rough. You end up not getting your "1" keybinding until last! This is a minor nitpick but felt like it was worth mentioning.

- Shooting the green ball downwards doesn't really work when it feels like it should. For example, for the green circle "donuts" I felt like I should be able to just look directly down at them and fire but you need to actually aim upwards a bit since the shot comes directly out of the gun's tip. A way around this is to have a zone in front of the gun and when it's colliding with the donut, just put the ball into the donut.

- Changing ball colors via the environment is super confusing. The original game eased you into it by telling you this was possible, but Crash requires you to remember that you can do this. I think the first time this tripped me up was when I had to turn the yellow ball into red during the third (?) skull fight.

- I feel like the skull ranged "boss" needed a better spawning mechanism. It felt like it was an unfinished asset where you just clicked on an open pipe and then the skeleton dropped down from the connected pipe. Maybe an animation of bones going in, or maybe a machine that "assembles" the bones? I'm not sure what the solution is but it felt a bit janky. Again, just a minor nitpick.

- A few NPCs should react to changes or you getting to certain places. For example, there were a few times when you get past the "security gate" of orangeburg but the guard continues giving you a hint of how to get past. Another minor nitpick, but it would help!

- The puzzle for getting over the wall in orangeburg with the purple pipe and force cube was extremely confusing. It's the only place in the game where you can push a force cube through a pipe (even though it was marked). The problem is the pipe going upwards looks like it's blocked off underneath it, making it seem like you can't connect the curved pipe to it. You could get around this by maybe opening it up? Not sure.

- Loop 4 was way too dark on my computer, even with brightness turned up a bit. This isn't that bad because loop 5 is day again.

- Extremely minor nitpick, but the knockback effect in the final cutscene where all the citizens get knocked back by the rocket needs work. Maybe a custom animation of them falling over?

All in all I enjoyed Crash as a solid 7/10. Supraland was basically 10/10 GOTY for me. I think my biggest issue was linearity and lack of meaningful progression, compared to the base game. Looking forward to Supraland 2!

[DavidM]

Thanks for the list!

Basically Crash is a little experiment based on the crash-loop structure. We will never do anything like this again, obviously.
This structure is very limiting in what you can do level design wise. Something we learned while making it.
We could only include meaningful story bits for each loop if we made them mandatory. It would not work if you skipped one of those, because it wouldn't make sense anymore to do it in the next loop. So the only solution to that was that the mandatory tasks give you lots of scrap and it's mathematically impossible to finish the loops without them. But I made sure that exploration is necessary and you can find things in tons of places and most of them are optional. So I bet you spent a big chunk of your time in the game exploring freely. I don't think it's as linear as you said.

Part of the experiment is also what it's like with no combat to speak of. We'll see. I think Supraland needs way more combat, but it's a nice change here.

[Veritas]

I guess exploration is still present technically, but the thing that's missing is rewarding the player with meaningful progression. Either way I really enjoyed the overall structure of the story. Thanks for the response! Looking forward to Supraland 2!

[DavidM]

In the main game I kept hearing complaints that you only get rewarded with little combat upgrades. So Crash handles this completely differently, to see how people will feel about it.

I personally prefer the surprise effect to not know what I will discover. But with the huge amount of secrets it's nearly impossible to reward you with outstanding stuff all the time.

I have some other plans for this issue in the future.