Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return (1999)

Gameplay: 6.3

While the game does do some interesting things with the platforming genre such as moving things forward with linear quests and incorporating an inventory system, it’s the controls themselves that ultimately lead to a lot of frustration. Tomba 2 is a playable game, but only just, and while the controls do eventually start to become workable they never really feel natural.

A lot of this is due to the fact that Tomba 2 never really commits to any particular kind of platformer, and while it does try to accommodate the player in this regard, it just never clicks. As a result, everything feels a lot more difficult than it needs to be, and genuinely fun patches of platforming feel few and far between.

Story / Value: 7.0

I typically appreciate just about any platformer where the story is more than “Go run right and jump on things”. Tomba 2 manages to give us a pretty basic Save the Girl story that incorporates some fun characters and basic quests while never coming off as intrusive of the actual game itself.

Presentation: 7.0

For its time, the game looks about as good as is to be expected. It’s hard to find any real faults as the camera generally behaves and there’s no glaring graphical flaws. We even get a nice little pre-rendered intro! That’s not to say the game looks fantastic by any stretch, but it’s certainly more than adequate

Music: 4.8

Oh boy… I can’t remember the last time I’ve actually had to turn my sound bar off to keep from stabbing myself in the ears. At its best the music in Tomba 2 is “occasionally bearable” and at its worst it’s an offense to the senses.

Sound: 7.0

Luckily, the sound department fares better. General sound effects are nothing special but the fit the game just fine. What was welcome is that every line of dialogue in the game is voiced! Now the voice acting quality is much more miss than hit, and the audio breaks between sentences make conversations feel awkward, but it’s still nice to have.

Fun / Afterthoughts: 6.5

There was just too much Tomba 2 had working against it for me to have fun with it. Now, sure, any platformer from this time period would have to be unfairly compared against the gold standard that is Super Mario 64 to which it pales, but even on its own merits I found it to be clunky and not very enjoyable. Even still, it never does anything so offensive as to call it a “bad” game, but it’s certainly not one I want to spend more time with and CERTAINLY not worth the asking price of a physical copy.

Review: 6.4

Gameplay: 1 Hour