'Crash' a blast for mutants of all ages

"Crash: Mind Over Mutant" was made as a game parents would feel comfortable buying for their kids, but a lot of the humor will be wasted on them.

Younger players may love the goofy characters and fast action but the game is also fun for older gamers who will pick up on many of the more clever jokes and can be impressed by the high variability of terrain and interesting abilities of the creatures you encounter and get to control. It might not be particularly innovative, and some play properties are downright frustrating, but overall it's a highly entertaining game that really lives up to the "all ages" category.

Crash Bandicoot has been through more than a dozen incarnations, and this version offers new features to add spice to the experience of those familiar with the title, but it is highly accessible to players picking it up for the first time. There are some recurring characters that older players might enjoy more, but anyone can be amused by the totally bizarre cut screens that are each done in a different fashion from infomercial to puppet show. It's here that the plot is revealed, with a pair of mad scientists creating the ultimate new mind-control device. Of course it's up to Crash to jump, climb, dig and fight his way around the game world, stopping their nefarious plan.

But the plot is much less important than the execution. There's an excellent selection of highly variable terrain in the game. You have to scale walls avoiding falling objects, time hops onto sinking icebergs, run around on funhouse-style rings, surf over water and avoid being blown off ledges by strong winds. The constantly changing obstacles the character moves through keep players on their toes, teaching you new moves along the way. Besides just fighting the terrain, you also encounter weird creatures that sound a lot like Woody Allen, girls attending "evil school," detonating robots and plenty of other villains that provide highly entertaining lines while you beat them up.

The signature difference between "Mind Over Mutants" and other Crash games is the presence of mutants that you can defeat and then ride on, controlling them to fight for you using their special powers. Fun, and weird, examples include a large blue rodent-faced creature that can sneeze to freeze water and a mutant that looks like a fetal penguin floating in a sphere with arms and legs and who can move things telekinetically to get rid of obstacles or toss other bad guys off cliffs. While these guys have powerful and fun attacks, you'll still need to return to using Crash for tasks that require finesse, like special jumps and burrowing underground.

The variability that makes the game so appealing is ruined at times by the need to backtrack. Several of your missions require you to go somewhere, do something and then go all the way back without any type of shortcut. Then all the features that were interesting the first time start to become tedious. Get turned around and you might have to backtrack farther, creating some serious frustration.

The other major failing is that there is no way to adjust camera angles. For a game where seeing what's ahead of you is so important, the single perspective is a surprising oversight, forcing you to sometimes make blind jumps because there's no way to determine what's beneath you. It's the singlemost annoying way to die in the game, but the abrupt load screens are a close second. Even if you spy bad guys around the corner, moving forward can stop you and, when the game comes back under your control, you wind up getting dog-piled instead of being able to prepare for combat properly.

All in all "Mind Over Mutant" is still a surprisingly entertaining game. With plenty of content to explore, plus optional quests along the way and three levels of difficulty, it can keep anyone engaged as they try to master the moves of the many mutants and Crash. Just be prepared to get intimately acquainted with some of the scenery.