Creative, ambitious, fresh, and unique. At the same time, clunky, glitchy, and not so fine-tuned. Crash Twinsanity brings a lot of new ideas to the table for the Crash Bandicoot series, such as an open world setting with collectibles to find. In hindsight, it seems inevitable for the series to go in this direction but this game was the first to do it, and it does it well. I love that this game is focused primarily on the story and the gameplay is based around that. The settings/level themes in this game are lovely to see - a fully explorable N Sanity Island, the iceberg labs, N Gin's ship, and all of the Evil Academy, as well as Twinsanity Island. Almost all of the settings in this game are top notch. The level design, art direction, and great music coalesce into an experience that was just extremely enjoyable. The bosses are great: not particularly challenging, but creative and enjoyable. The final level along with the boss are very memorable and a tough but great ending to the game. As a long time Crash fan, I had not played this game until now, so I have no nostalgic connection to it. After seeing how safe Wrath of Cortex played it, Twinsanity is a breath of fresh air. The controls are good, most of the time. There are instances where too much precision is required for how imprecise the controls are (the rolling ball puzzles, cortex-boarding sections, etc.), but it does not affect most of the experience. What does affect the experience are the glitches that run rampant in this game. This game was completely rushed out the door which is why this game is either loved or hated. I personally am willing to look past the glitches and general jank that the game provides, but it was definitely there. That being said, this game was such a good direction to bring the franchise into. It is truly a shame it couldn't live up to its potential due to its rushed development. I am willing to appreciate what's here and admire the ambition and passion displayed by the developers.

This game, so far, extremely fascinates me. The game is like an alternate universe version of Warped if it was extremely mid. Like, not even bad. I just wonder what happened during development for the game to come out like this? The visuals of the environments go back and forth between looking really nice to really awful, and the character model quality varies heavily (usually leaning towards looking bad). Aku-Aku invincibility states don't have a clear indicator of when they end because the invincibility music is way more quiet and subtle compared to the loud tribal drums that clearly gave you a sign of when they're about to end, and your hitbox is not increased. Lots of sound effects either don't play when they're supposed to or they're mixed incorrectly. The music is often very good (ESPECIALLY for Cortex Vortex and Eskimo Roll), but it's also mixed so poorly that I sometimes can't hear it even when the game is at max volume.

But despite all that, the level design itself isn't awful? I actually like the way the levels are laid out in this game, they're just dreadful to actually play because Crash and Coco control so terribly. They're extremely floaty and slow. They feel like if you stuck a Lego Star Wars character into Crash Bandicoot. Normally, Lego Star Wars feels very fine to control, but Crash shouldn't feel like this.

The boss fights mostly suck. Rok-Ko's fight was a cool idea, but the execution fell flat because the ball controls are terrible outside of the ball levels designed for them. Wa-Wa isn't even a boss fight against him and Crunch, you're really fighting against the camera and the terrible depth perception above instant-kill water and projectiles. I also probably spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out how to beat Py-Ro before I realized that shooting the water cannon on the mech suit slows you down when you're chasing him back to the other side. It took me ages to realize what I was doing wrong, but the fight is piss-easy otherwise. Lo-Lo actually has a really fun boss fight that I enjoyed, probably only because it was copied from N. Gin's Crash 3 fight. The final boss was anticlimactic, but REALLY good! I actually like the Cortex/Crunch fight a lot! But yeah, the Elementals are extremely disappointing, as underdeveloped characters with underdeveloped boss fights.

That issue of depth perception I mentioned for Wa-Wa actually has affected my whole experience with the game. I can't tell if I'm being tricked because Crash moves so slowly compared to the previous games that I think he should be farther ahead than he really is, or if it's because of the collision of the character being bad, or if it's because the camera is so terrible that I can't tell how close or far something is from Crash. I'm misjudging the distance of so many jumps and enemies, taking contact damage, falling into pits, and whiffing spin attacks that you'd think I'm a brand new player based on how poorly I've been doing in the first 3 worlds of the game, as I write my initial thoughts. I literally have never had this issue with the PS1 games so I'm not sure what's the problem here.

This is one of those games that I think REALLY deserves a remake, though I'm typically opposed to the idea of game remakes, generally. You don't have to change anything, just adjust the controls, stick the game in a new engine, and give the game the polish it lacks. I think it would be way more passable if just a few things were tweaked.

EDIT: I wrote this review before fully completing the game, so I wanted to add on at the end that I had a way better time getting all the Platinum Relics in this game than I did playing most of these stages normally. With a few exceptions, this game was extremely easy to get the Plat Relics for. The issue of depth perception will always be a problem, and made some relics way harder to get than others because you waste time whiffing so many spin attacks and jumps, but using the Crash Dash somewhat remedied the control problems I complained about. It sucks that this is a post-game powerup that exists only for getting Relics, but it was like that in Warped as well. Unlike Warped, though, Crash controlled completely fine at normal speeds so it felt like a proper powerup rather than a fix for slow and floaty controls.

Also, after understanding the circumstances the game was made under, I'm a little nicer towards it. It was supposed to have been a next-gen, ambitious experience, and Traveller's Tales had to restart development partway through and finish in 12 months. That explains why so much of the game is like a worse version of Warped, they probably tried to refer back to it and base the new game off it as closely as possible in the time they had. It doesn't excuse the quality entirely, but I understand how it turned out the way it did.