In the 90's, many of the videogame companies wanted to have a mascot as popular as Mario or Sonic, bust most of them ended up in failure. This tendency even appeared in the PlayStation era, many developers wanted a piece of the cake of the fame of Crash Bandicoot. One of them caught my attention; my older brother’s gamer dream was to play the prequel one of his childhood PlayStation favorites. A couple of months ago we had the opportunity to try it. This game is Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, a platformer for the PlayStation, Saturn and PC. Let’s get started!
This game has an interesting background story, the developer Argonaut Software was the company who created the Super FX chip, capable of create polygons and thanks to this chip the game Star Fox came to the light. Argonaut Software wanted one of the licenses of Nintendo’s characters in change, Yoshi in particular. However, Nintendo denied, maybe to avoid repeating the story of the CDi Zelda games and Mario Hotel. With that, Argonaut decided to create the game by its own; they wanted to create the first 3D platformer. Finally, the game came to the light but appeared in the PlayStation system and others.
The premise of the game is as follows: one day King Rufus, leader of the Gobbos, a race of diminutive beings, was walking along the riverbank when he found a small basket containing a baby crocodile. Since Gobbos are an extremely compassionate race, King Rufus and his fellow Gobbonians adopted the baby reptile and raised him as one of their own. Nicknamed "Croc", the baby reptile grew up into a healthy, happy young crocodile who, for all intents and purposes, considered himself to be a Gobbo.
All was well until a vicious tribe known as the Dantinis invaded Gobbo valley and took King Rufus prisoner. The evil Baron Dante used his magical power to turn good creatures into evil monsters and soon the entire Gobbo valley was in a state of chaos. Croc was the only hope left for the Gobbos. Only he had the size and strength needed to overcome the evil Dantinis and save his beloved homeland.
You must cross five Islands (four normal, 1 optional), each one with 10 levels (6 normal, 2 bosses and 2 hidden levels) which you have to rescue six Gobbos on regular stages. This game is a platformer, but sometimes with some kind of open world feeling to me sometimes, also with some light puzzles and minigames. This game has a similar health mechanic, like Sonic, but instead of rings, it’s with gems.
This game can be a problem with the controls; you have to move your character with tank controls, which is an obsolete/unused gaming standard and can be a headache for those who has not played games with that mechanic before, increasing the difficulty artificially. The controls were difficult to me when I started, but later I got used to it.
This game highlights with the music, they made a very good job with that, it feels that fits well with the levels, it is a point on favor to the game.
You can move the camera in this game, but the camera system is not the best, sometimes in certain parts you can’t move the camera in the place you want, making you to cross your fingers after you jump to another place, you can move the camera in the position you want, but you have to be insistent. The levels sometimes feels repeated, because they reuse some mechanics even in the same island, causing some levels to lack in diversity, feeling the same experience in certain levels. It is not as Donkey Kong Country, which each level is a unique and new experience and does not use the same dynamics again. Another point is the bosses; sometimes you don’t feel that some of them are real bosses.
Unfortunately I could not complete the game in a 100% thanks to my save file got corrupted somehow.
In conclusion, Croc is a game that hasn’t aged well, even if this game was a little revolution in the industry thanks to the absence of 3D platformers back in 1997, don’t get me wrong, the game was good and entertaining to me, but some points of the gameplay discredit it.
My score: 7/10