After the evil Baron Dante arrives at their valley home and captures the tiny Gobbos, it’s up to Croc to venture forth and free the Gobbos from the evil baron and reclaim their land. Now, I never grew up playing Croc, let alone heard of the reptile growing up outside of one small Nintendo Power ad for the Game Boy game, so I was going into this game with no nostalgia in any way and, I have to say, right off the bat? This is a fun game and one I’m surprised I never got around to playing until now.
The gameplay is as simple as can be, meaning you won’t have to worry about insane button combos to pull off various moves or complex puzzles that would make the puzzles in Discworld seem like Tic-Tac-Doe. Nope, you’ll run, jump, stomp, and awkwardly tail swipe your way to victory. I say ‘awkwardly’ as this brings me to my chief and biggest complaint with the game: The combat is spotty. You have two moves to attack enemies, a tail swipe and a butt stomp, and while the butt stomp was more accurate and I was able to defeat enemies with it constantly, the tail swipe never really seemed to work. Most of the time, I ended up getting hit by the enemy when I tried to swipe them more often than not. I did try attacking a few seconds prior to getting close to the enemy and that did seem to alleviate some of the issues but it was still spotty at times. I kinda wish there was some sort of rolling attack move, but there’s only a tail-swipe and ground pound. I basically ended up avoiding most of the enemies and focused more on collecting the various crystals and trapped Gobbos in the game. The only place where the combat did work slightly were the boss fights but, even then, the hit detection still felt just slightly off. The only boss fight that didn’t work out was the one underwater boss as underwater combat is a whole ‘nother issue. The swimming controls are fine and all, but trying to fight underwater isn’t the greatest. On that note, I do like how each boss is introduced, with the main villain, Baron Dante, walking up to some random creature in the world and turning them “evil”. Well, ‘evil’ may be a bit of a stretch as he mostly just makes the creature grow in size and gives them a small fighting chance, but still. It still fits the cartoony world this game is set in.
Combat aside, the rest of the gameplay is solid, with just a few minor issues. Throughout the five worlds, you’ll be exploring and collecting various little items on your way to the end level gong: Crystals, which acts as your health, granting you an extra hit or multiple if you manage to re-collect the crystals you lost when you first get hit, though it seems to be only ten that you lose. So, if you have collected fifty crystals and you get hit, you’ll only be able to collect ten of them, for some reason. There are also six trapped Gobbos in each level and these little guys are very easy to find, thanks to audio cues, as they’re usually hidden within boxes you need to smash or, on occasion, you’ll need to find a specific key in order to save them. The sixth one, however, is always behind a Crystal Door, which requires five coloured crystals and these, to my surprise, are relatively easy to find as they are pretty much out in the open. Collecting all the Gobbos and five crystals in every world does unlock a secret final boss level, so there is incentive to explore and find everything. What holds the gameplay back, for me at least, outside of the combat, is the platforming. Sometimes it’s easy to judge where you’re going to land and grapple, thanks to Croc’s shadow, but other times I found myself either missing a platform completely as the shadow didn’t appear or falling off a platform because I moved one inch too far to the side. This was especially irksome in the later stages where platforms were either really small or vanished the moment you landed on them.
Graphically, this is a cute looking game and still holds up to this day. Croc, himself, has a cute design to him and I love his little sounds he makes when he does anything like jumping or pushing a block. In fact, if I may say so, they remind me a lot of the noises the Spies made in those Spy VS Spy Mountain Dew ads from back in the day. Even the various enemies and bosses are cute in their designs, almost kinda reminding me of Banjo-Kazooie enemies in a weird way. I also dig how you can easily switch between the original and remastered graphics with a push of a button and, surprisingly, the retro graphics actually still look good as well! One area where I will say it doesn’t look good, either retro or remastered, are the snow levels, namely the areas with pits. The rest of the snow world is fine and all, but the brightness when it comes to the pits in this world is cranked up so bright that it was hard for me to judge my jumps onto the small platforms at times. Outside of the graphics, the sound is another place where this game does shine but not too brightly. As I mentioned before, Croc’s sounds are downright adorable, but the rest of the game's sounds do tend to slide slightly into the ‘eh it’s OK’ area. The music, though, is catchy as all heck! The various tunes you’ll hear throughout the game are some amazing toe-tapping songs, with many almost being earwormy in their catchiness! One standout song, for me at least, is this one tune that plays whenever you’re in an indoors section; it might just be me, but it reminds me alot of a song you’d hear in the classic Addams Family show.
I'm kinda disappointed I missed out on this game as a kid as I feel this would've been a game I played for hours on end. Even with the less than stellar combat and, at times, iffy platforming, Croc: Legend Of The Gobbos is honestly a fun little game and it’s great to see such a legendary developer like Argonauts back in the game again! Who knows? With so many classic mascot games returning, maybe we can finally see a return of Buck Bumble, too!
