An admirable(?) effort to update a quirky game
I don’t remember ever playing games in the Croc series, especially not Croc 2, but I don’t necessarily have to worry about missing out on some amazing gameplay experience. That’s no offense to the series, just that the games were very of their time, early in the world of 3D gaming on gaming consoles. Croc 2, originally released in 1999 on Playstation and PC, was an okay game at best. The developers at Argonaut were expanding on the original but not breaking the mold. With the success of the first game’s remaster under the newly reformed Argonaut, with help from Titanium Studios, a return to the second was inevitable.
Well this is Croc 2, in all of its glory, whether we expected more or not.
It’s worth noting that if we’re looking for something completely revamped we’d need to look elsewhere. This is a remaster, a repackaging of the original game with intents on improving the presentation and preserving its history, and not much more than that.
That being said, it does a solid job of it.
The game has some charm — it’s a very basic 3D platformer by today’s standards, focusing on a mascot that’s as cute as a polygonal crocodile can get. We have the ability to jump, attack and run, albeit that era’s controls weren’t all that great. Hit detection is off, character movement is rough, and we do tend to get stuck in some areas. But that’s what that original game was. It wasn’t perfect, and if we’re trying to preserve and not remake then that is anticipated. I don’t want the game to change, I just want to play it (or rather, someone does).
Because of the simplicity of what 3D games were back in the 90s, the cleanup done with Kingdom of the Gobbos is really good. It retains that clean design, keeps things fairly flat (like lava) but improves the resolution and smooths the animation. The audio, as weird as it is, is cleaner even if the voices are annoying as heck. The package is also loaded up with two other versions of the game (a nice touch if we want to torture ourselves), a bunch of art assets, models and even videos and interviews. It’s a solid package full of stuff that anyone interested in Croc 2 would appreciate.
I have to admit, though, I don’t like Croc 2. Like, at all. It’s not a good game. It fights us in enjoying its world, its puzzles are mostly bad, and the platforming feels completely off, with no matter of shining up being able to fix that. The first put off that hits us is a treasure room that has us excruciatingly jump across platforms and spikes just to get a small heart treasure at the end. A lot of the design feels like it’s not worth it, just fluff to fill a game.
But, uh, again, that’s not the point.
Croc 2: Kingdom of the Gobbos is a gussied up repackaging of a quirky point in time that was launching mascots into 3D worlds. Most of us missed it, and now we can finally check it out to fill that reptilian hole in our gaming history heart. Sure, why not?
3/5 ⭐⭐⭐
Good
This review is based on a Steam copy of the game sent to the Editor by the publisher/PR.
