I don’t understand most platform games. I’m not suggesting that I’m confused in some way by the games themselves it’s just that I find their general appeal to be a mystery. I’ve never been a big fan of the genre which posed a problem back in the day since the majority of Megadrive games seemed to be platformers. I appreciate when a title breaks the mould in some way or at the very least it endeavours to be more interesting, either in story, characters, or setting. This is the reason I found Aladdin to be decent while Earthworm Jim was fantastic and why games such as Flashback and Blackthorne always appealed to me more than Sonic or Mario.

Crash Bandicoot came along at a time when the Sony Playstation was enjoying unprecedented success and everyone else seemed to lap it up while I found it dull and repetitive. The game reminded me of similar titles on the Megadrive such as Bubsy the Bobcat and Bonkers. Those were the type of games I’d rent from the videostore, play for a couple of hours, ignore it for a while, and then return it to the store unsatisfied. The big question is – what are my opinions on Mind over Mutants?

I accept that this game is not aimed at me but I’m also aware that it was created by people who shouldn’t be satisfied with watering down games until there is little more on offer than annoying characters and painfully repetitive gameplay. At some point I am pretty sure there must have been a half-decent idea on the table which didn’t involve backtracking constantly in order to help a bunch of annoying characters which few people could give a damn about. I have never believed that children are a bunch of humourless idiots and even as a young kid, while off my head on sugar, I’d have found the puppet-show interludes in this game to be about as funny as an unfortunate accident involving some loose skin and my trouser zip.

It’s not even as though my underlying hostility can be explained by me being terrible at this game because that’s not true at all. There are parts of this game which I found a little frustrating but most of the time I just had an issue with the constant repetition which is asked of you. It certainly didn’t help that I found all of the characters in this game to be either annoying or incredibly annoying so much so that my initial reaction upon meeting any of them was that I couldn’t care less about their predicament and I certainly didn’t want to help them with it.

I didn’t enjoy the time I spent playing this game but I understand that young fans of the series will want to play this game no matter what I have to say. This a hard thing for me to admit as I like to grab any opportunity to share my wisdom with the world. If you sit a child down with this game they will probably find it entertaining but there are no shortage of similar titles on the market and my advice is to look for an alternative handing over your cash, hard-earned or otherwise.

5/10

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