Croc 2 Review

Some two years ago the computer world became subdued to a strange Voodoo magic. We started taking any game with 3D environment with some respect. About that time appeared Croc - an amiable dragon, and brought with him some of the Super-Mario-Nintendo64 atmosphere to PCs.

So, a year later, we meet Croc 2. I will immediately state that

I am not really pleased with the sequel. The very first look at the less than impressive graphics gives you an impression of an at least two-year-old game. It's just like looking at a slightly tweaked first part.

Ubi Soft's last year's favorite, Rayman, was incomparably better. For those of you who don't know: Croc and Rayman are fairly similar, as is any other game in this genre including the imminent (some would say unsurpassed) Super Mario 64.

So, what's wrong with Croc? First, the textures are very bad. They lack detail; they are way too small, and that when you stick the same small picture on a big surface a thousand times it looks extremely monotonous. When you take in consideration that the terrains consist of a relatively small number of polygons, the impression is far from being good. As for the water, sky and voids, I don't know if I should call them textures at all, because they just look like polygons painted with a single color with no shading.

Another annoying thing is that most locations are surrounded by simple flat surfaces; you always have the feeling that you are in theater because the walls around you are cardboard scenery. That's what I call ugly. Most of the levels in the first world make you think that designers made just a couple of locations and then copied and pasted them as much as they needed to fill the entire level.

There is not much smoke or light effects to improve the atmosphere. Everything seems to be too simple and raw... The overall graphics quality is something like Super Mario 64 played on an emulator (UltraHLE) on a PC. If you had no chance of seeing anything like that just imagine how textures created for TV display look like in high resolutions. This is just one thing that justifies negative feelings of PC owners towards PC renditions of games that were originally made for consoles.

I must admit my first impression was terribly bad, so that I really had to make myself play the game, hard-core masochist style... Still, let us for the Time being forget about my impressions and start all over.

Croc has returned (from wherever he might have been in the meantime) and he is ready to find his long lost parents. "But the search soon becomes a showdown as Croc's archenemy, Baron Dante, is magically resurrected by his evil Dantinis". There's your problem for you... Our dragon finds himself again among fuzzy creatures called the Gobbos. The story commences on a sunny beach where Croc learns from a couple of Gobbos that the world they inhabit has a lot of problems. Our hero, being a true hero, wants to help them, no matter how stupid their problems may be. So, you will have to visit four Gobbos tribes in their villages: Sailor village, Cossack village, Caveman village, Inca village as the adventure unfolds...

Those of you who played the first part will know their way around and will have no trouble accommodating. The little dinosaur is relatively easy to control, meaning that you will have to get used to the controls first, just like in any other 3rd person 3D arcade. There are two (similar) control types and you will have to decide which one you like better. My biggest objection there is that you cannot really feel your position in space during long jumps. Usually, you can estimate Croc's position in air judging by his shadow, but when he has to jump from a liana onto a platform in the middle of a ravine, and there is no shadow, you are facing a serious problem, probably followed by aggressive behavior and curses. I did not manage to master those jumps even after a relatively long period of playing.

Apart from his jumps, Croc also uses "butt kick jumps" and tail punch with a 360-degree spin. These are the moves you'll use the most, but sometimes you'll have to cope with driving a mine cart, boat or hang glider... Croc also has his inventory in which he places items bought at Swap Meet Pete's Shop available in all tribes.

This shop is of great importance because here you can buy useful things like extra lives, GummiSavers, Clockwork Goobos, or teleport to another tribe, for a reasonable sum of crystals. Extra lives do not require an extra explanation. Gummisavers are rubber cushions, which you place on designated places, and they enable you to make more exotic jumps. There are three kinds in existence: Crystal Craze Gummi Saver for simple jumps, Wild Berries Gummi Saver for long jumps and Five Flavor Gummi Saver for double jumps.

Even though Swap Meet Pete insists on picking the proper Gummisaver for each specific jump, that is in most cases irrelevant because any Gummisaver will do. These jumps are not necessary if you just want to rush through the levels as quickly as possible: they simply give you access to crystals, extra lives and other bonuses. All the same goes for using Clockwork Gobbos: you have to stand in a designated spot (some sort of a seal) as to activate it, and it will collect for you everything on some unreachable platform. Apart from these, useful, thingies, in his inventory Croc also has binoculars, but I never figured out what they should be used for (and they are very inconvenient to use). As for the bonuses, every level has 100 ordinary and several colored crystals, as well as few heart-shaped health-packs scattered about it.

I sincerely expected more from Croc 2. As I already said, the first part offered a lot to its successor, yet the sequel failed to keep track with times and trends. We'll just have to see if Croc will succeed in maintaining popularity on PC, because his failure on console market is imminent thanks to Super Mario, Gex and alike. As for PCs, Rayman 2 still remains the favorite in the genre.