The Crash series makes its debut on the next generation of consoles, and it's forgoing PlayStation exclusivity, as it's now also going on the Nintendo GameCube and Xbox.

Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex follows up the last game, as Crash and Coco must once again stop Cortex and Uka Uka from taking over the world... but they've got company this time, with new rival, Crunch!
Also, the Elemental Masks are also here to cause a ruckus, so we have new enemies this time.

And that's where this game's originality sort-of ends. Of course, there are a few more things, but this game borrows heavity from Crash 3, that it many aspects, one can call this game a rehash.

There are new aesthetics this go around, in addition to old ones, but many of these new themes only last one or two levels, because this game's name is inconsistency.
Remember in my Crash 3 review how I said that the game's vehicles and how many there were could be a point of contention amongst fans?
This game has even more vehicles, and some of them are not really fun to control, like the aerial fly-like vehicle. With that one, you can only shoot after you've locked-on, which takes a bit, and leaves you vulnerable to enemy attacks. I find this one really dumb, because they already had used the airplane from Crash 3 earlier in the game, so why introduce this new, inferior one?
There's also the mech, which its jump while standing still is horrible, and there's the mini-submarine, which its turning is really slow.

It's not all bad, for example, the game's new ball levels were actually pretty fun to go through, but there were only 3 of them, so they barely got fleshed out.
And that's the thing, this game barely fleshes out anything because it's constantly switching things up.

Like Coco herself is playable without any vehicles... for like 2 levels, I believe. And I liked playing as her. I know she's inferior to Crash since her moveset is just jumping and spinning, but I don't know, I actually liked that simplicity.
But again, you don't get to play as her that much, so I'm left unsatisfied and underwhelmed.

The game's presentation is also pretty underwhelming. The characters look pretty ugly in general, especially Cortex. Although the game's voice acting does pick up the slack, as we have new voice actors joining in like Mark Hamill, Thomas Wilson and Jess Harnell, and their performances were really good, in spite of their lines being very bland.
The music as well was also pretty good, reminded me a lot of Traveller's Tales previous work, like their soundtrack on the Toy Story 2 video game.

Overall, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, while not a bad game, just leaves me underwhelmed.