Brainwashing the dangerous titular titans to let you ride on their shoulders and direct their wrath is a lot of fun. Kick your way through a Boar's defenses, and then use him to pound obstacles and bad guys into dust. Beat a Snipe into submission, and you'll down enemies and tag targets from a distance. Every one of the fifteen controllable beasts has its own combination and special attacks, from tusk swipes to spikes that erupt from the ground. Get a friend to take control of Carbon-Crash with a second controller, and you can even hijack each other. Best of all, as you get deeper into the game you'll run into conditions where your only chance for survival is climbing the food chain one rung at a time, commanding bigger and bigger nasties in sequence until the largest falls under your spell. This all lends what could've been a rote exercise in flavorless combat a tiered strategic complexity.
Unfortunately, battle isn't always pleasurable. Sometimes you'll die in a big hurry because two intersecting brawlers never gave you an opening or a chance to escape; on other occasions you'll drop to the dirt in defeat when you can't hit an off-screen goon thanks to a camera you have only marginal control over. Such issues seldom tip the scales too deep into frustration territory, since you're usually dropped right back into the action without having to endlessly repeat the same sequences, but a little tuning on the more aggravating scuffles could've gone a long way.
The key to enjoying Crash of the Titans is not to take it too seriously. There's the usual nonsense about Neo Cortex taking over the world, but the different animal personalities are so charming, and the self-referential humor so relentlessly silly, that you're unlikely to cry foul too loudly. Crash might be getting on in years for a videogame mascot, and his latest outing falls well short of classic status, but a few disarming new tricks prove he's not over the hill just yet.