Activision has put Crash Bandicoot 4 developer Toys for Bob on Call of Duty: Warzone development duty.

A tweet from the official Toys for Bob Twitter account said the studio was "proud" to support development for Season 3 of Call of Duty Warzone, "and look forward to more to come."

However, California-based Toys for Bob appears to have suffered staff exits as part of this shift. Character designer and illustrator Nicholas Kole, who worked at Toys for Bob up to January on Crash Bandicoot 4 and, before that, the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, tweeted: "it's the end of an era, but I wish my former coworkers still with TFB all the best with what's ahead!"

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The PC version of Crash Bandicoot 4 launched exclusively on Battle.net yesterday - and players weren't exactly thrilled to discover it's always-online.

Crash Bandicoot 4, which does not have any online multiplayer, requires an internet connection to play on PC - as seems to be standard practice with Battle.net games.

Players have reported issues with this requirement, such as login errors that force the game to close. These login errors reportedly present themselves even when your internet drops while playing. It also means that any issues Blizzard experiences with its authentication servers could make the game unplayable.

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Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, the latest entry in Activision's long-running platform series, will be making its way to PC on 26th March.

As the '4' in the title indicates, It's About Time is a direct continuation of 1998's Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped - a game that got a gorgeous remake as one third of 2017's Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy - and very much takes inspiration from the early series' brand of platform action.

There are wrinkles to the formula, of course, including masks that slow time, flip gravity, and phase objects in and out of existence, as well as various new modes and playable characters - each with their own unique abilities and stages - but it should all be immediately familiar to Crash fans. It's About Time even leans into the early games' brutal difficulty - although a choice between Modern and Retro modes help ease the sometimes immense challenge.

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Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time hits PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch on 12th March, Activision has announced.

Toys for Bob's well-received platformer, which came out for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in October 2020, launches on PC via Battle.net later in 2021. The new all platforms trailer is below:

If you own Crash 4 on PS4 or Xbox One, you can upgrade your version of the game for free within the same console family and bring your progress with you.

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Crash Bandicoot 4 was the best-selling boxed game in the UK last week, narrowly beating Star Wars Squadrons to the UK chart top spot.

But neither game beat the last game in their respective franchises - both boxed sales totals were down around 80 per cent.

There's always the digital factor in play - download sales are still not counted by UK numbers company Chart-Track - and it's likely slightly more sales will be digital in 2020, even for mass market games like Crash.

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Fans of Crash Bandicoot might be in luck. Recently spotted shenanigans in a new PlayStation commercial join a pile of mounting evidence suggesting that a new Crash game is on the way.

The advert in question, titled It's Time to Play, features a procession of high-profile video game mascots interacting with non-video-game humans - with one segment, in a nod to Crash Team Racing, featuring Crash and pals roaring around a car park. Here's where the mystery lies.

It's a bit of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but as the mostly familiar karting procession closes in on the camera, a second mask can be seen hovering just behind Coco. Floating masks aren't, of course, anything new in Crash, but this particular once has not, as far as fans can make out, been featured in a game before.

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The November Humble Monthly bundle is giving up not one, not two, but three games in one of the most generous early unlocks so far.

You can pay 10/$12 to get access to Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy, Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Call of Duty: WW2 immediately. That's some crazy value for a trio of games that would cost well over 100 or $100 at full price!

It makes a dramatic change from last month's bundle that only offered up Battletech as an early unlock when it was announced. Sonic Mania did follow a few weeks later, though. Now that we've entered October, the rest of the games in that bundle have also been announced. Subscribers should find The Spiral Scouts, Planet Alpha, Override: Mech City Brawl, Puss!, Avernum 3: Ruined World and Roman Sands now sitting in their library.

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He's back - again - and seemingly more popular than ever. Crash Bandicoot's N. Sane Trilogy arrived on Xbox One, PC and Switch last week, once more racking up impressive sales. Indeed, Vicarious Visions' port to Nintendo's hybrid managed to best the week one tally of the impressive Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Clearly, demand is high for the remastered cartoon antics of this particular Bandicoot, but how does the quality of each version stack up against the baseline template set by the existing PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro releases?

The Xbox One side of the situation can be covered very quickly. Playing the game on the base S model offers up an experience that is virtually identical to the standard PlayStation 4 game. The visual feature set is identical and resolution is the same at 1080p, with only the most minor fluctuations in performance setting it apart from its Sony counterpart. Put simply, base Xbox users can go in safe in the knowledge that they're getting an excellent experience - and that only ramps up on Xbox One X, where Crash retains its solid 30fps performance but ramps up the pixel count to a full 4K. That's an impressive 2.25x increase over the 1440p of PS4 Pro.

But the console builds are still pegged to 30fps - one of the only real disappointments we had with this remaster - and that's where the PC version can make a difference. GTX 960 or GTX 1050 Ti-class GPU hardware delivers 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second, but what was immediately apparent on our i7 test rig was that CPU utilisation barely registers. So we undertook an experiment, lashing up a PC based on the same AMD Jaguar CPU cluster as the consoles, overclocked to the same 2.3GHz as Xbox One X. Even lacking the 2.5 extra cores available to developers and even carrying the significant burden of the full-blown Windows OS, our system could run Crash 1 and 2 almost flawlessly at 60 frames per second at ultra settings with a GTX 960 (though shadows needed to drop to high), though strange bottlenecks we couldn't explain prevented us from achieving the same thing on Crash 3.

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