When playing along the Main Path level and against a Boss in a Boss fight level, you will always have the option to play as either Crash or Coco. These characters can be selected at any time within the dimensional map.
However, you can also unlock alternate characters by reaching their levels within the Main Path. After you complete an alternate character’s Main Path level, their Timeline levels will unlock.
Crash
Goofy and more than a little clueless. Crash would like to be the cool prankster rebel who doesn't care what you think, but really nothing makes him happier than making other people smile. He'd be pleased if everyone just got along, and sometimes that desire blinds him to the reality that he does, in fact, have enemies.
Crash doesn’t talk – he doesn’t need to – his outsized expressions don’t leave room to wonder how he’s feeling. He’s happy to let everyone else chatter, a big grin is all he needs.
Coco
Crash’s younger sister Coco is the brains of the family. She’s a tinkerer and a problem solver by nature, possessing an innate inquisitiveness and blue-sky imagination. Her trusty pink tablet is never far from her reach. It’s filled with neatly organized schematics, work-in-progress ideas, and notes to herself.
Unlike her brother, she possesses a healthy skepticism of other people and their motivations. She’s usually content to let her brother make his own mistakes (and get a good laugh at the results), but she’s always ready to swoop in at a moment’s notice if it seems like he’s going to get himself into real trouble.
Tawna
This is not the Tawna you remember, but that's easy to say about someone from another dimension. Tawna comes from a universe where she's the hero - a confident, accomplished adventurer. She’s been all over the world and has yet to meet a cliff she won’t dive off, a mountain she won’t climb, a cave she won’t explore. When she accidentally falls into another dimension, she doesn't even bat an eye. More worlds to explore are cool by her.
Dingodile
Dingodile is a creature of simple desires. He just wants to do whatever, whenever, with whoever – none of your business, mate. After Cortex disappeared, he opened a small diner. Dingo would have been happy to lay low and live out the rest of his days in peace... well, relative peace. He finds out the local bat population has taken a disliking to him when they blow up his beloved diner. He takes his explosive revenge, but before he can rebuild, he winds up falling through space and time to another dimension.
Cortex
Crash’s oldest enemy, his arch-nemesis, and, perhaps somewhat awkwardly, his creator. Cortex is your classic mad scientist – though he’s less interested in science as a discipline but instead more as a means to his nefarious ends. He won’t be content until he rules the world, though heaven knows what he’d do with it once he had it.