God why do they even make games that are this broken? And why do game reviewers feel like it's okay to equivocate to a middling score of 7 or 8 in the face of such fundamental flaws?
To get straight to the point, Crash N-Sano is a shot-for-shot remake of the original three Crash Bandicoot games for Playstation. It is a graphical update that preserves the exact level layouts of the original recreated in a new engine capable of rendering 1080p 30fps motion-blur visuals with gruesome lighting effects. Despite making no modifications to the level layouts, the developers have changed the height of Crash's jump* (accidentally or intentionally, who's to say). Crash, perhaps tired from years of overwork, simply can't hit the heights he once did, and now jumps a few pixels shorter than in the equivalent PlayStation titles. To retiterate, this is without any modifications to the level layouts to accommodate.
Now, if you're not recoiling in abject horror that a developer could modify a platforming character's jump height without expecting any repercussions on the experience, Crash Bandicoot may not be the series for you. See, the entire pleasure of the Crash games, very much like the Donkey Kong Country titles that clearly inspired them, is the rhythm and flow of platforming. It's the gradual accumulation of that melody for each stage, the building of muscle memory such that however hard each stage, it will feel perfectly natural by the time the player has mastered every jump. There are no stutters, no shimmies, no need for visual alignment or minor tweaks - it's all timing and technicality, hitting the right inputs without needing to think. This isn't every platformer, mind, just this specific subgroup that more or less boils down to Bit.Trip Runner. So when you change the properties of a particular move, it's like altering the time signature of a composition. The whole fucking thing changes. Though this doesn't necessarily ruin the song, if every note and break has been perfectly configured to sound right at its original time signature, you can't simply expect equivalent results after altering that. And, more importantly, you shouldn't tell someone they're getting the original when you've made that swap.
What bugs me nearly as much as the audacity of the developers and publishers in letting this slip through is the cavalcade of reviews that note that Crash's controls or mechanics 'feel off', but can't be bothered to investigate further than that. Many of them note that this may be because of the mapping from digital D-pad Playstation controls to an analog stick on Switch/PS4, and others observe oddities with hitboxes. Yet no one (that I saw published on Metacritic - surely some dude on Youtube has made this his life's purpose) sat down with a PS1 copy of Crash 2 and a handheld Switch and did a side-by-side comparison to root out the specific issue, something that took me far less time than it did to compose this screed.
*alternately, Crash's entire hitbox may have been shrunken, such that his head doesn't reach as high at the peak of a jump and his feet don't reach as far at the length. The effect is the same: overhead boxes that could previously be bonked with a normal jump are now out of reach, and ordinary gaps that could previously be spanned with a normal holding-forward jump now require a slide jump.
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