If you were, like me, pleasantly surprised with the last Crash Bandicoot game, Crash of the Titans and saw that Crash's latest offering had all of the monster jacking mayhem you had come to grow and love, you might be inclined to pick up Crash Bandicoot: Mind Over Mutant and take another trip to Wumpa Island. After all, what could be better than mind controlling one Ratcicle, but mind controlling many, many Ratcicle's, right? Wrong. While Crash's latest offering retains the same great sense of humor and voice acting the gameplay and technical issues drag down the entire package.

Dr. Cortex is at it again, this time teaming up with a blast from the past, Dr. Nitrus Brio to enslave all of Wumpa Island through the use of the NV, a super duper headset gadget that allows the user to read and send text messages, download music, and, conveniently enough, be mind controlled by our evil doctor friends. Think the Google Android phones were it not for that pesky FCC. Crash is immune to the mind control, no doubt due to him being a moron, and as such is Wumpa Island's only hope against the dastardly doctors.

Whether you play the game on the 360, the PSP, or the seventeen other platforms it has been released on, you'll get the same story and the same core experience. Crash can still jack mutants with the help of Aku Aku, and while riding the mutant he'll have access to all of their powers. New to the series is the ability to store a mutant in Crash's pocket, allowing for him to always have the right tool for the job, as well as make "is that a mutant in your pocket" jokes. Crash also has a few new moves including the ability to dig underground and collect mojo as well as a counter move that allows Crash to land an overpowered punch. Even with Crash's new skills, he's still not as interesting to play as the various mutants scattered around the place, which is a shame given his name is on the game.

Both platforms also highlight some fantastic voice work and genuinely hilarious writing. The cut scenes in between missions are all done in various animation styles and are a real joy to watch, whether it be on the large or small screen. Even the throw away lines spoken by the various enemies populating the levels are hilarious. It's a shame that the rest of the game isn't at the same level as the writing, as the game play isn't enjoyable enough to where you'd want to stick around to see what the next cut scene brings.

For one, the fixed camera is just useless. When Crash is moving away from the camera, things are, for the most part, fine. The real problem is that Crash has to do a lot of backtracking, and I mean a lot, and when doing this backtracking he's running towards the camera which doesn't afford you the view needed to make jumps or not run smack into an enemy. The backtracking is annoying enough, but running off of a ledge because you can't see it when backtracking is super, mega-annoying. The problems even arise in the co-op play afforded to the 360 version. In this case, the camera is centered on Crash, so if your partner is playing as CoCo and they're not moving in unison with you, they're given the short end of the camera stick, never able to fully see they're character. Yeah, they would play as Aku Aku, but you don't do much there, just shoot chickens at enemies.

As annoying as the camera in both versions is it doesn't hold a candle to the overwhelming aggravation that is the frequent and long loading screens found in the PSP version. If this review were the game on the PSP it would go someth-LOADING SCREEN-ing li-LOADING SCREEN-ke t-LOADING SCREEN-h-LOADING SCREEN-i-LOADING SCREEN-s. The loading screens appear all of the time and they go on seemingly forever. On more than one occasion, Crash would do something that triggered a small cut scene, no doubt showing the player some small piece of information, however I'd never see the cut scene, I'd just see the LOADING SCREEN, and hear the audio from the cut scene. By the time the LOADING SCREEN was gone, so was the cut scene. Oh well, hope that wasn't important. The 360 has various random LOADING SCREENs too, and they're annoying, but the annoyance in the PSP version has been elevated to an art form.