Crash Bandicoot: On the Run!

When I first heard about Crash Bandicoot: On the Run, I was excited about the prospect of playing a Crash game on my phone, especially one built with the platform in mind. The pre-release screenshots inspired most of my hopefulness, making the game out to be a safe but enjoyable combination of Subway Surfers and the N. Sane Trilogy. The developer's history didn't inspire a lot of confidence in the potential player-friendliness of the game, but I stayed hopeful nonetheless. Upon release, I found that everything played out generally as expected, if not a little worse. It all looks and feels pretty great, but the execution is a total disaster.

The primary goal in On the Run is to defeat interdimensional bosses and their henchmen, thereby returning them to their home dimension. You do this by avoiding obstacles and attacks in three-track auto-runner levels until you are close enough to hit your opponent with a portal weapon. If that was the whole game, I would be happy. Unfortunately, that's just the start. In order to get the portal weapons that you need to challenge an interdimensional baddie in the first place, you need to craft. You have multiple crafting machines on the island that you can use for this purpose. Providing a machine with the resources needed to craft a portal weapon of choice will trigger a countdown, after which you can collect your weapon. This already poses all kinds of problems, such as using premium currency to speed up production just so you can play the game more, or needing to collect the resources in the first place.

As you might expect, these resources need to be earned somehow, leading us into the place where you'll likely spend the majority of your time when playing this game. Outside of your base, there is an entire island of mind-numbing stages to collect resources in. These stages look similar to the more intriguing boss fights, but have so few obstacles and absolutely no enemies, making crate-breaking the only interesting thing to do. This might have been okay if they were used as short bursts between the actual gameplay, but earning resources takes so long, and you often have to play more than one of these stages to collect all of the resources that you need for even one boss fight, so you'll be wasting a lot of time here. The island also has some difficult challenges available to tackle, but the rewards are so meager and meaningless that I never really felt compelled to play them.

This means that the main gameplay loop boils down to wasting time running through boring stages, wasting time waiting for crafting to finish, and then getting a short burst of actual fun when fighting a boss. All of that nonsense packed together with aggressive sales prompts at every turn makes Crash Bandicoot: On the Run a real disappointment. I was really hoping to enjoy this game, and the foundation is absolutely there to make it into something special, but the implementation failed on so many levels, leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth.
The game is available for Android here (as of 8/18/21): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.king.crash&hl=en_US&gl=US
The game is available for iOS here (as of 8/18/21): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/crash-bandicoot-on-the-run/id1510334752

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