A PS1 classic that just doesn’t seem to hold up. J.J. tells us why this is probably one you’ll want to skip.
Limited Run Games, with their carbon engine, has decided in their almighty wisdom to release a port of the PlayStation 1’s Tomba! in a Special Edition format. I like Tomba! I was excited for its return because it represents a very specific point in time, where critics were really sick and tired of 2D games but people are still learning 3D games. So Tomba asked the question back then, “What if we made a 3D game out of a 2D game?”
And while it was a cool idea and real first for gaming, it really, REALLY should have stayed back in 1997.
Tomba is a 2D side scroller with an intriguing take on combat. It really revolves around 2 things: throwing a morning star and leaping on top of downed enemies for further platforming and attacks. We can climb up walls and rooms, and it’s multi-planed so that we can go into a building that’s in the background and move back and forth.
It was really, really clever and cool in the PlayStation 1 era. I like it from that standpoint. I don’t think it holds up particularly well today.
This release kind of sucks. It’s very bare bones. I fully understand that Limited Run is more into the preservation part of gaming with the Carbon Engine. So it’s like, what do you do to it? What can you really do to it to release it? And the developers didn’t really do much — and what they did do is kind of worse. For one they’ve added a new soundtrack to it that isn’t very good. In fact it’s so bad that some of the music overpowers the sound effects.
There are some interviews in this package, too, so it’s interesting to hear from the developers. Tomba has a lot of Capcom lineage, with team members having worked on some popular 8-bit and 16-bit franchises. So it has some cache behind it. It’s nice to see these, but they probably could have just been a YouTube video.
And perhaps most worrisome is that the game is broken, and wouldn’t launch much of the time. I had to delete the game and re-install it to continue through it. This review isn’t even on a pre-release code; the game’s been out for a few weeks now and people are still having that problem today (one look through the Steam message boards shows all kinds of folks with the same issues).
All of the positive user reviews trend the same way, with people mentioning how this was once of their favorite games as a kid since this was the king of thing that wasn’t on PlayStation at the time. The game wasn’t available for decades and I’m glad it finally is, but it’s just not a good game now. There’s not a reason for anyone who hasn’t played Tomba! to try it, since we’ve moved so far from this effort since then. Maybe fans want to relive their childhood, like I did, but then we realize that maybe it should have just stayed there.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live! for August 22, 2024. Images and video courtesy Limited Run Games.
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