Worst in series
Twinsanity marks Crash's first adventure game in a fully 3-D world. While most of the levels still maintain the linear path, this game really does provide the first fully 3-D roaming experience, and the results are, well, mixed. For me personally, I had a hard time adjusting to the new look and feel. For starters, the crisp pixels of the past have been replaced with the polygonal approach, which results in everything looking a bit fatter and somehow "cheaper" like a Hannah Barbara cartoon seen next to a Looney Tunes original.
Thanks to the rotating camera, I found controlling the characters to be very frustrating when I had to hit some very specific marks, like bouncing up multiple rows of boxes to reach a special item, or running up a circular path trying to dodge obstacles under a tight time limit. The problem is the camera constantly shifts to a predetermined position, and while you are supposed to be able to control it, you very rarely can do so enough to get it where you need it to be. In the 2.5D games of the past, missing the mark was never an issue, but in full 3D with a wildly rotating camera, it's very hard to plan where you will be landing next. This led to ALOT of cheap deaths throughout. And you can forget being able to freelook to try to find any object that might be hiding just off screen.
The presentation of the gameplay was also an issue. In the past, you would select what order you wanted to face a set of five levels, then fight a boss, then move to a new level, with backtracking as simple as going to the main screen and reselecting a former level. Here, you move from one end of the island to another, encountering level sequences as you go, and backtracking becomes a HUGE chore! When you want to go back and find the game's hidden gems, you often have to traverse entire levels multiple times, just to get back to the area you want to explore.
And this is made all the more frustrating because of what I believe is the games single biggest flaw - the flaw which really lands it in "thumbs down" category for me. There is NO way to skip cut-scenes in this game. There are full-motion movies that can be skipped, but the in-game cut-scenes are non-skippable EVEN AFTER YOU'VE SAT THROUGH THEM ONCE BEFORE!! That means, when backtracking, you will keep having to sit through long cut-scenes over and over that become less amusing each time - EVEN WHEN YOU'VE BEATEN THAT PORTION OF THE GAME!
What's even worse is there were times when I would come across a difficult section or boss fight, and after each death, I would be sent back some ways and have to make my way back to the difficult section and AGAIN sit through that increasingly annoying cut-scene over and over again! This KILLS the rhythm of trying to figure out what you're doing wrong, because by the time you get back to the difficult spot, you've already forgotten what you tried before!
The forced cut-scenes not only serve to frustrate you, but also lengthen the game considerably - a game which is pretty short in the first place. Were it not for these repeated cut-scenes, you could probably work through the game in a day (though I suppose the same could be said of all the previous Crash games).
My final frustration was with the gems. They are hidden throughout the game, seven or eight per level, and the menu keeps track of what you have and haven't found, which is all nice. Most of them are easy to spot, but not always easy to get. They provide an incentive to revisit past levels - however, there is no real reward to finding them. In previous games, finding gems opened up new parts of previous levels to explore, but that is not the case here. All you get here is unlocked artwork in the menu (whoop-dee-doo) and finding all of them gives you an added ending, though I can't really recall what the added ending was, which should tell you how anti-climatic it was after bothering with all the revisiting of past levels and cut-scenes.
For all these faults, though, the game is not a total loss. When you are embroiled in the levels themselves, they can be quite fun. And this time out Crash offers several new gameplay styles revolving around controllable characters. Through a handful of levels, you will control both Crash and Cortex simultaneously, where combo moves are required to proceed. These sections were pulled off pretty well where they could have easily felt contrived. The animations of the characters can be visually hysterical, such as at the beginning when you are basically a ball made up of the two characters wrestling and punching each other as you roll past various obstacles. Later, you will be throwing Cortex to out-of-reach ledges to trigger door locks, or rolling him through pipes to access new areas, or using him as a surf-board to race down mountain slopes. And in what is perhaps the game's best new innovation, you will occasionally have to run ahead of Cortex as he's being chased by a bear or a swarm of bees and clear all obstacles out of his path. This happens twice, and I'd have loved for it to have happened several more times.
At other times, you will control Cortex alone in a third-party run-and-gun mini-game that felt very tacked-on. It was not very well fleshed out and was somewhat more difficult than fun. The same can be said for the wedged-in character of Nina Cortex, who you will control for one drawn-out level. She's a little more fun to play as, but again, her inclusion feels like a last-minute throw in.
The writing of the cut-scenes is pretty good - the story is indeed laugh-out-loud funny in parts - but again, they lose their charm quickly after sitting through them four-five-six times in a row.
All told, I did manage to enjoy the game, but only just barely. It's really a shadow of the fun of previous Crash entries, and it certainly pales in comparison to other recent platformers such as Ratchet and Clank, or the Mario franchise. I can only recommend that you rent it and give it a shot before committing to a purchase.