Your goal in Wrath of Cortex is to once again stop Dr. Cortex's evil plans, this time by jumping, spinning, and belly-flopping through 24 levels as Crash and six levels as his genius kid sister, Coco. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex can be summed up as textbook. It closely guards itself to all the guidelines of platform games and rarely strays from the formula. So you get the basics. Crash can walk, run, sneak, slide, jump, and spin about, all with a tight sense of control familiar to everyone who's played the previous games. It's run in 3D, but you won't find the wide-open, go-anywhere worlds you might have jetted through in Super Mario Sunshine. Instead, the levels are confined to a set path; Crash can run forward in some stages, towards the camera in others, and to the side. In these types of levels, which make up the majority of the game, the goals are as simple as the play style: make it to the end, avoid hazards like gaps in the ground, enemy characters, spin and break open boxes, jump into boxes, and collect fruit and items. The challenge of the areas, especially in the first several worlds, isn't difficult, but there is still some tangible measure of satisfaction gained by collecting and completing stages, which I'll chock up to solid design. Stages are likewise well paced and varied, a combination that flows the gamer along smoothly

There are additions and standouts. Crash can use a number of vehicles through the adventure and these moments arrive as welcome breaks from the been-there-and-done-that general stages. The first time I piloted the hero through an underwater level inside a mini-submarine, for instance, was very entertaining. There are similarly stages where Crash must fly through the air in dogfights, or use a mech to destroy the area around him, which are also fun in their own right. These parts of the game are always much more fun than the standard gameplay, and their production values are so much higher than the production values in the rest of the game that it's a shame they are the smaller portion of the game. Hopping into a vehicle is always a nice surprise, but you'll have to pause and refer back to your manual to look at all the capabilities of the craft you're in, since the game doesn't give you all the details. The vehicles aren't complicated, but each behaves differently enough that a one-time informational pop-up would have been useful, as you are often immediately in danger as soon as the vehicle sequence starts. It's a wonder that a game that mimics so many other platform game conventions has ignored the common practice of telling the player what to do with a newly acquired item.

Seasoned platformer fans, however, are still likely to find Crash's latest entry a little too simplistic, formulaic or lacking of evolution, especially when compared to some of the more complex, ambitious competing games on the market, like Super Mario Sunshine. The liner paths of a Crash level give you a claustrophobic feeling after playing in the huge, open areas in Sunshine. Even the method used in the progression of the game is markedly poorer than the one used in Sunshine. You move between levels using a "virtual reality hub," which is just a series of portals laid out side-by-side in a nondescript blue room, and there's no plot progression to speak of, so after the opening cinematic, you're just using the hub to move between levels until you reach the end. When you play a level as Coco instead of Crash, there's no explanation or warning given, you'll simply enter the level's portal as Crash and come out the other end as Coco. It's not all bad, but compared with Sunshine, it seems very uneven.