This game seems to be nothing more then an insult to it's predicesor and a huge blemish on the Crash francise.
The story in this game involves a... something or other named Viscount, who's basicaly the wario of the crash world, Ergo, a evil gready ass. Wanting... Something, Viscount desides to search for the super big power crystal, (Yes, that is what it's called.) But, being too lazy to do it himself, he desides to trick the inhabitants of... where-ever crash actualy lives. Soon enough, Coco get's a letter, inviting her to "The great cannonball race," With the prize being $1,000,000. Coco, being the brilliantly-minded girl she is, belives this letter that just randomly came into her letter box, and Crash and Aku-Aku deside "Oh hell yes! we're coming too!" cue about 1 hour of runing about on board mazes, trying to find objects and get used to the controls.
Yes, you heard me, getting used to the contols. There is no instrucion on how to move about, the most important part, but Aku will come EVERY SINGLE TURN to say "USE ITEMS NOW!" You'll just want to chop the mask in half with an axe by the time it's done.
So, after messing about with the controls for nearly half an hour, you'll finaly learn the contols, or cave and try the manual, which isn't much help either. So, you finaly start playing the game for real, and get to "enjoy" the minigames.
And here's where EVERYTHING goes wrong. For a start, the games are ment to be randomly picked, but there's so few per stage, you'll probably be playing the same game over and over and over again. I'm not kidding; I once played THE SAME MINIGAME around seven turns IN A ROW. How can that happen? Bad game design, that's how.
Another thing: The minigames are insanly easy, but you'll still lose some of them. Why? because the AI gets cheap sometimes. Also, the hit detection on some minigames, such as the tracing minigames, feel a little suspect. You'll draw a line nearly perfectly in the middle of the drawing area, but it will still say that you failed and promptly make you do it again. This gets annoying quickly.
The smaller things aren't implamented well, either. Nearly everything has a time limit, meaning that if you're not paying attention, you can miss on opitunities to get items. You have a limited time to choose items, read instructions, pick a direction, and so on. The minigames cannot be paused, which is a big mistake on a portable console. The motion pannels are constantly sent by the AI, and in some minigames, they take away all control, forsing you to either wait, or blow them off, probably getting shot or losing in the prossess. The music get's anoying and repetitive, Some of the characters just look ugly, and the minigames range from "kinda fun" to "just plain stupid."
Overall, this is, if anything else, an unfinished game. It's short lenth and annoyingly repetitive gameplay, music and AI will annoy all but the most loyal Crash fans and the yongest kids.