ToeJam & Earl Back in the Groove review: too retro for its own good
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Of all the retro game franchises to see a revival in the post-HD era, ToeJam Earl is perhaps the strangest. A cult favourite though the original 1991 game may be, it’s obtuse, clumsy and painfully slow even by ’90s standards. The new game, Back in the Groove, makes no real attempts to counter these issues. In fact, it embraces them.
The titular heroes are a pair of funky space aliens just trying to do funky space alien things, but it all goes awry when their spaceship (and the nearby planet Earth) gets sucked into a black hole and scattered around the void.
Each time you start a game you’re faced with a series of 25 levels, which are interconnected flat islands floating in space, joined together by magic elevators. It’s a setup near identical to the original game, and it plays the same too. Throughout the levels you’ll find good earthlings which will give you benefits, bad earthlings which will hurt you and presents which you can use for a range of effects like healing or flight. Ten of the levels also contain a piece of your spaceship, and getting them all is the only way to win.
Early levels are generally a cakewalk, with one or two humans kicking around and nothing much to do except shake trees and shrubs looking for presents while searching for the elevator and parts. But there’s a lot more hiding under the surface, especially in later levels. Hidden paths and shortcuts are littered around the stages, and the sheer number of different earthlings and presents — each with its own characteristics you’ll want to learn in order to maximise the efficiency of your run — is staggering.
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