Activision recently announced that the fourth main installment of Crash Bandicoot, subtitled ‘It’s About Time,” will come to consoles this coming fall, as it’ll be released on October 2. Aside from what the trailer showed us, we don’t know much about the game, but a marketing email from GameStop might’ve given us our first major detail regarding Crash’s next adventure.
According to the email, Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time will have more levels than the entire N’Sane Trilogy combined, meaning that it’ll have more than 100 levels. The first game in the series featured 33, the second had 32, the third had 37, which adds up to a total of 102.
The marketing image, which can be seen below, says the following regarding Crash Bandicoot’s fourth main installment: “full sequel with 100+ levels of play, new game models, and new abilities for innovative gameplay.”
During a recent interview with IGN, Lou Studdert, who the game’s design producer, talked about why they decided to call the game Crash Bandicoot 4, even though several games, albeit less successful ones, have been released since 1998’s Crash 3: Warped.
“It’s not just Crash 4 because narratively we’re continuing off of where Crash 3 ended, where, Uka Uka, N. Tropy, and Neo Cortex are trapped in time and space. But we’re also continuing off of the gameplay of the original trilogy.”
As shown in the marketing photo posted above, Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time will feature new abilities that’ll be unlocked by finding Quantum Masks, as finding four of them will allow players to unlock different skills. So far, two have been detailed, one of which allows players to freeze time, and the other will allow players to alter gravity, which will give Crash the ability to traverse different obstacles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qF5JrciMnU
Also during the aforementioned interview with IGN, Studdert talked about having less big difficulty spikes than in the previous three games, all while maintaining challenges within the game that’ll keep the core fanbase satisfied.
“We want to have less difficulty spikes. We want to onboard the players and get them into the story, but at the same time we wanted to see if we can actually exceed the difficulty of the original games. We wanted to see if we could add in extra modes, extra challenges, extra things that we’ll be talking about later to really bring the pain. A true Crash fan wants that level of difficulty, and I think we’ve met and exceeded.”
Crash Bandicoot: It’s About Time will be available for consoles on October 2, and according to its PlayStation Store listing, the game might even have a multiplayer mode. Of course, it was revealed in the game’s trailer that it’ll feature multiple playable characters, so it’s likely that the game will feature a local, split-screen multiplayer mode.
