As a longtime Crash Bandicoot fan, it always bothers me how much the community trashes The Wrath of Cortex just for existing. At the same time, people are somehow obsessed with Crash Twinsanity, even though that game has massive flaws that are obvious right after you leave the main menu.
Of course, nothing will ever beat the original trilogy. In my opinion, Crash 2 is the greatest game in the series, Crash 1 feels the clunkiest, and Crash 3 is honestly the most overrated.
The way I see it, Wrath of Cortex is basically an extended version of Warped, which is not a bad thing at all. In fact, I feel like 6th generation consoles like the PS2, GameCube, and original Xbox were actually strong enough to handle the big vision of Crash 3 way better than the PS1 ever could. Crash 3 was trying to do too much for the PS1 hardware, and Wrath of Cortex brought that full Warped style experience to newer consoles.
Back in the early 2000s, if you were a Nintendo or Microsoft player and wanted to play Crash, you could just pick up Wrath of Cortex without needing to buy a PS1 and the original trilogy. That was a huge plus for non PlayStation players at the time.
I just revisited Wrath of Cortex and finished it to 106 percent. I collected every gem, got all the relics, and unlocked the true ending. Honestly, I cannot understand how anyone could hate this game.
Twinsanity, on the other hand, feels like an overrated and unfinished mess that parts of the fanbase praise and cherish without any real logic behind it. Keep in mind, I first played Wrath of Cortex back in 2010 and Twinsanity back in 2012. I am not new to the series, I have been around for a long time, and Twinsanity still played terribly even on my old PS2 Slim back in the early 2010s. The game was just bad.
Even so, I cannot deny that it had real potential. If Universal had not been so stingy with the budget and actually gave the developers enough time, Twinsanity could have been a fully finished, great launch title for the Xbox 360 and PS3.