Croc: Legend of the Gobbos Review (PS5)
Summary: Despite the kinks and knitpicks, Legend of the Gobbos will endear players with its accommodating easiness, making it a lovely, gentle and ideal welcoming to retro gaming for children, while giving adult retro lovers a pleasing blast from the past to indulge in. It's not perfect obviously and it lacks the inspiration and magic of its contemporaries, but all the same it was a good game for its time that deserves to be experienced. The remastering effort on display here is lovely and should certainly entertain and please gamers young and old. A legendary platformer it may not be, but Legend of the Gobbos is certainly a worthwhile adventure that's returned with a solid remastering effort.
3.8
Croc Rocks
Get ready to pack your backpacks, we’re off on another nostalgia trip! The time is 1997 and the game is Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, a platformer this reviewer has never previously played or even heard of. Like its contemporaries at the time, a cute protagonist, colourful levels, collectible gathering and straightforward short levels are all packed into this little curio, which has now been remastered and delivered to remind us of how easygoing and pleasant videogames used to be. Does this remaster reawaken the Croc franchise with vigor, or should we duck it and wait for the elusive remasters of GEX?
Remastering a classic can be tough as there’s always pressure to stride a careful balance between faithfulness to the original version and renewing the game for a modern audience. Much like the recent Tomb Raider remaster collections, Croc: Legend of the Gobbos is an aesthetic upgrade that retains the original game’s identity while sprucing up the visual and sound quality-typical quality of life upgrades in other words. Another similarity to those remastered Tomb Raiders is that you can toggle between the classic retro graphics and the newly remastered graphics-just to prove there is a lavish remastering job that’s been done here.
The way Croc is animated is impressive too. The way he merrily wiggles his body as he runs is very well done, and seeing him bop every time he jumps up in the air is as gleeful and sweet as that little tooth poking out of his mouth. Croc is definitely emblematic of the relaxed and endearing qualities of 90s platforming, and this remaster does a splendid job by nailing this essence superbly.
As for the premise, Croc is an adorable newborn crocodile at the beginning floating through a river in a cot, who is found and raised by a benevolent family of puny googly-eyed creatures known as gobbos. After some playing and acclimating to his new family member, Croc bears witness to a green benevolent giant, who stomps into view to sour all the cheery family fun, and he orders his minions to cage a bunch of gobbos including King Rufus-so now you’re obviously tasked to save the fuzzy little muffins by freeing them from captivity, and ultimately rescue King Rufus from the benevolent and evil Baron Dante-you know the regal green fellow with a navy glove on his right hand.
Unsurprisingly there’s no complex character interactions or deep storyline turns here, with the basic set-up providing you the incentive to adventure through platforming levels. The stages in Legend of the Gobbos are formatted in a similar fashion to the series of levels in Donkey Kong, where there are a handful of small stages that are capped off with a boss battle, and once you’ve conquered that boss, you advance to a new environment with tougher challenges ahead-but not too tough, this is a 90s platformer not a soulslike!
Each level in Legend of the Gobbos typically involves collecting gems, tail-whipping hostile critters, nabbing keys to open cages with innocent timid gobbos inside, as well as hopping between moving mounds and slippery surfaces, so while each stage is short, there’s no shortage of activity to keep you engaged and challenged. The levels aren’t decorated with memorable features unfortunately, and given their succinctness they’ll fly by, but as long as you’ve hoovered up those diamonds and freed those gobbos you’ll be all good to move on. Collecting diamonds and gobbos aren’t as essential as tail-slapping the gong to signal the end of a stage, but seeing as diamonds contribute to Croc’s health and rescuing gobbos is a morally decent thing to do-you should try to collect and rescue everything you can before moving on.
If you happen to be bitten by any of the pests you encounter, you’ll lose a bunch of gems you’ve worked hard to collect up, and while it is frustrating to lose all these gems and given a threadbare and minuscule time limit to collect them up before they fade away, there are plenty to find. You’ll need to be careful of falling into lava and pits as well because that is more of a necessity in this 90s platforming experience than in modern-day platformers. As long as you remember that you’re playing a 28 year-old game, you’ll forgive Legend of the Gobbos and its antiquated idiosyncrasies.
The controls for Legend of Gobbos have been reworked for this remaster, and they are smooth and fuss-free, although jumping still feels imprecise and if you’re new to this classic, you may initially become baffled about where to go because early on there’s a level that has a climbing wall that Croc can ascend, but the game doesn’t tell you about it, so you could become puzzled until you figure that out for yourself. Croc is capable of performing a huge butt-drop too, and while it’s great for breaking boxes and squishing the tummy of a certain boss, it’s mapped to the jump button, which is a poor design choice because you may believe Croc has a double-jump until you find his little tush engulfed in a lava pit.
A platformer of Croc’s caliber wouldn’t be complete without a bunch of bouncy bosses. Featuring boxing ladybird who looks like it has a spotty Easter Egg on its back (c’mon, this game comes out in April, so the Easter Egg comparison was topical), a rocket-hovering pest, an ice demon complete with horns, a whizzing cactus beast called Cactus Jack (nothing to do with Mick Foley), and the giant galoot Baron Dante himself, there are a smattering of diverse bosses Croc will have to conquer if he is to save the gobbos and restore peace to the tranquility of Gobbo Valley.
Now, if you were expecting a platinum trophy with Legend of the Gobbos, you will be sorely disappointed. This remaster contains 20 trophies and no platinum to obtain, but you should set aside your disappointment and play this classic regardless while rejoicing in its simplicity that stems from a time where we gamers were garnering pleasure from videogames without the pressure of obtaining abstract rewards.
Despite the kinks and knitpicks, Legend of the Gobbos will endear players with its accommodating easiness, making it a lovely, gentle and ideal welcoming to retro gaming for children, while giving adult retro lovers a pleasing blast from the past to indulge in. It’s not perfect obviously and it lacks the inspiration and magic of its contemporaries, but all the same it was a good game for its time that deserves to be experienced. The remastering effort on display here is lovely and should certainly entertain and please gamers young and old. A legendary platformer it may not be, but Legend of the Gobbos is certainly a worthwhile adventure that’s returned with a solid remastering effort.
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