It's Dingo Time

Dingodile has been revealed as fully playable in Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time! Revealed on Thursday 6th August in PlayStation's State of Play event, a new narrated trailer unveiled the popular character as fully playable in a swamp-like environment.

Looking at the footage, players can use his weapon much like the suck cannon in the Ratchet and Clank franchise - suck up crates to gain their wumpa fruit or suck larger TNT barrels to be thrown back out for massive explosions. The new air-based weapon is also shown to make Dingodile fly for brief periods, much like the PSP game, Daxter. It remains to be seen whether the weapon can be fully utilised as a flamethrower like his debut boss in Crash Bandicoot 3: WARPED, but the gameplay already looks incredibly promising.

The festivities don't stop there, however. The video was a full 5-minute trailer with narration from developers, Toys For Bob. This meant there were other exciting nuggets to glean besides the reiteration of no micro transactions in the game.

Dressed for the Occasion

Crash and Coco will both have multiple skins that can be unlocked. Coco, now fully playable throughout the whole game (yes!), was shown to wear many new outfits, not least of all an N.Gin-style Rockithed attire. N.Gin, now sporting a giant musical weapon called the Weapon of Mass Percussion (WOMP), seems to have become quite a hit, so it's great to see references to areas and time periods throughout the game from the outfits. Crash was even seen wearing his 50's motorcycle attired from WARPED, a pirate outift and 80's style neon club attire. Oh, and a chicken. I can't wait to see what other skins will be available in the game from each time period, awarded by finding hidden gems in the levels.

Coco kind of looks like she's from Ape Escape, here

A New Perspective

Lastly, the trailer revealed that Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled developers, Beenox, has also been helping out. Specifically, the team have been creating new filters and modes for each level. These dimenionsal shifts mean we can now play levels with new twists on them, such as like a wacky black-and-white sped-up cartoon or a Forgotten Swan-style paint-the-white-areas-when-you-spin type of level. Whilst I don't think these are that groundbreaking, they do offer neat ways of replayability in already visited levels, offering bumper berries instead of wumpa fruit to then spend on rewards.

Crash slides into a new Virtual-Boy style as he replays one of the levels

All-in-all, the trailer has left me thrilled and even more excited for Crash 4. We got glimpses at story elements and even managed to see Dr. N. Tropy's scary face as he will undoubtedly double-cross Cortex at some point. Even Uka Uka and Aku Aku popped up this time, looking better than ever. Who knows who else is going to pop up in the future? I can't wait to find out!

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time is due for release on 2nd October 2020.

Dr. N. Tropy smiles a devilish smile in Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time