Activision impressed us with the brilliant Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 and with the new Crash Bandicoot 4 – It’s About Time, it looks like a pattern is forming. The firm looks intent on mining its exhaustive IP, delivering remakes then moving onto brand new sequels. Based on the quality of this release, it’s a strategy that may well play off – Crash Bandicoot 4 is a solid game and an authentic series entry, with numerous improvements and upgrades that pay off while respecting the original formula. The new release also makes use of Unreal Engine 4, offering numerous technical improvements over the recent remakes including a much higher frame-rate – at least if you’re gaming on the right consoles.
Crash 4 perfectly captures the look and feel of an animated film – expressive character models stretch and squish in a cartoon style in both cinematics and gameplay, while gorgeous per-pixel motion blur accentuates every movement. The UE4 motion blur is one of my favorite things here – the shutter speed settings are just perfect. That said, you can disable this from the options menu if you’re not so keen on the effect. The point is that the quality of the animation work is truly on point here, the visuals are first class and the overall package is excellent in presentational terms.
Background detail is ramped up across the board too with beautifully off-kilter models lending the game the exaggerated look you expect while still offering a lot of detail – and I mean a lot. It’s still very much an on-rails experience, but that’s perfectly fine and allows the developers to build some stunning looking worlds to explore. I especially appreciate the materials quality and lighting – it’s a cartoon-like game for sure, but everything has that tangible feel you’d expect from a pre-rendered CGI film. To see it all play out in real-time in a fully interactive format is a real treat.
Other nice details include the gamut of UE4 features such a screen-space reflections – there’s nothing new about this technique but the rail-guided nature of the camera system means you rarely see the limitations, meaning the visual hit is strong. Liquid surfaces also react to movement with ripples forming in your wake. More importantly, pretty much every visual effect is intact no matter where you play the game – and this is where we get into our first point of comparison. Resolution-wise, image quality in Crash 4 is interesting – it seems to target 1080p on all consoles except the base Xbox One which appears to operate at 900p instead.
The Xbox One X does at least receive a crisp 4K user interface, mind you, but the 3D rendering is of a lower resolution – in fact, even Microsoft’s six teraflop machine occasionally uses dynamic resolution scaling to maintain frame-rate. Yes, this is indeed an X title that (very rarely) dips below 1080p for the sake of consistent 60fps performance. Thankfully, despite the somewhat lower pixel count, it’s not a huge issue. Unreal’s image treatment puts in the work here and the game winds up looking clean across all platforms. It’s a little soft, true, but it has a very CG-like appearance that is attractive and isn’t reliant on extreme pixel counts.