Croc: Legend of the Gobbos

The Good
I picked up Croc around the time it first came out, but i never got around playing through it until now. The first thing that i noticed i liked about the game was the music. It really fits the look of the game, with happy melodies and warm instrumentations. The sound effects, while repetitive after a while also comes along nicely, with Croc's little cry "ka-schplat!" when he destroys enemies as my favorite.

The animation is very smooth and the colors are bright, just like they are supposed to in a game of this kind.

The Bad
Here's when I started finding the cracks in the nice surface. This game is just about as generic as they come. They could have made Croc really stand out, but they became lazy and looked at every other single platformer out there and just stole bits from them to put this one together. How about; Collect 100 diamonds, get extra life. Get touched by an enemy and all those diamonds will come flying out of you, leaving you vulnerable to the next hit. Sounds like any Sonic game to me. The normal setup of stages. Grass, Ice ect. ect. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

The enemies, while nicely animated, are terribly boring when it comes to design. None of them stand out and none of them will be remembered the second you turn off your Playstation, not even the bosses.

Why they decided to go with the type of control setup they did is beyond me. When you play a platformer you need tight, responsive controls and not something that would fit Doom or one of the earlier Resident Evil games. Instead of doing the obvious and having Croc run left when you press left, and back when you press back, he [i]turns[/i] left when you press left and walks backwards when you press down. This means that when you're standing on a platform that's about to crack to pieces and fall into an abyss, you usually end up screaming in panic as Croc takes his sweet time turning around to face where he's supposed to instead of doing a swift jump a' la Mario to safety. Also, in the underwater levels Croc is as easy to navigate as an atomic submarine filled with syrup. Press left while swimming and he seemingly doesn't do anything. Do it again and he turns way too much instead. I can't tell you how many times i died because of these poor controls.

The Bottom Line
This isn't a game I would recommend people to buy even if it's found in a bargain bin somewhere. There are lots and lots of better platformers for the Playstation.