The third is admittedly more of the same plus vehicle levels and new abilities after beating bosses (double jump, super spin, etc), so I don't know if you'll care for that if you're already not impressed with 2 at least. I am curious though...
Speaking as someone else who finds the rest pretty average I really didn't find what I played of 3 to be any better, I'd argue it's kinda worse off (compared to CB2, haven't played the first in ages so can't really compare) for the two reasons you specified.
Those bike stages man, those bloody awful bike stages alone ruin Warped's chances for redemption, it seems to be a thing with that eras platformers to get bogged down in ill advised gameplay variety and minigames for sequels (take a bow Banjo Tooie), I wonder if it was ever a pro and not a con.
I get what they were doing with the added abilities trying to add more variety to the gameplay but some of them come across as a bit too much, double jump with a hovering spin is one hell of an increase from the standard jump, bazooka can allow you to just snipe at certain hazards from a distance, in either case I'd argue stage obstacles take a bit of a hit due to these being so useful.
Really I never found the enclosed corridor like design that most stages in the trilogy employ to take much advantage of the newfound 3D space, it's like they don't get the strengths of either 3D or 2D platformers and sit in some kind of limbo that can be kinda entertaining at times but man do a lot of the stages just start to meld together without enough elements to really differentiate stages for the most part.
While we're on about recently played platformers I finally got myself around to Ducktales Remastered last week. I can't really think of much to say about it, it was kinda fun by virtue of the pogo mechanic alone, I don't recall much of my limited time with the NES original so I'm not really sure how this fares by comparison level design wise since they made collecting some treasure mandatory this time around to increase level length.
The character chatter wasn't as bad as I feared, I mean it's small time compared to Puppeteer at least and there's the ever handy skip option in the menu, would be nice if you could play a mode that just auto skips banter as if I return for a replay then I'll be skipping away regardless.
Otherwise it was indeed a thing that I played, yep....man I really can't think of much to say about this one at all, just pogo mechanics are fun. I guess more could be done with the level layouts or obstacle variety but then I need to remember it was a NES title remake, I can at least say you don't need nostalgia for either the game or show to get some fun out of this.
Oh and it goes without saying that the remixed music is pretty tasty.
