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This game introduces Croc as a crusading crocodile who must
rescue his friends, the Gobbos, from the evil villain Baron
Dante. Baron Dante has taken over the Gobbo Valley and is turning
all good creatures to evil with his magical powers. With amazing
graphics and animation, including moves such as swimming,
swinging, and flying, you can explore with Croc in more than 250
individual game areas on 45 levels.
From the Manufacturer
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Help Croc, the crusading crocodile, rescue his peace-loving
Gobbo Islander friends from the grasp of the evil magician Baron
Dante. This game has five different 3-D worlds to explore and
includes volcanoes, forests, ice glaciers, and underwater caves,
each with its own unique elements, terrifying monsters, and
mind-boggling obstacles. Stunningly rendered real-time 3-D
graphics and seamless animation provide hours and hours of
gameplay with over 40 levels, 50 different enemies, and 9 stage
bosses. Free-roaming 3-D gameplay lets you go anywhere as you
run, jump, climb, stomp, and even swim.
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Review
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The operative word here is cute, on the order of Fraggles, M&M
spokescandies, and the language of R2D2. This conversion (from
the Sony PlayStation) of a 32-bit Mario 64 clone stars Croc, a
big-eyed, anthropomorphic, backpack-wearing crocodile who has
been raised by a race of ultra-cuddly Fry Guys called Gobbos - a
race now enslaved by the giant "King of all Villains," Baron
Dante. Croc must traverse the game's dozens of levels, liberating
the entire race of Gobbos one at a time.
At your disposal is a handful of standard 3D platform adventure
gaming tricks. You've got Mario's jump to squash your enemies.
You've also got a more original 360-degree spin where you lash at
the bad guys with your tail. You've got Sonic the Hedgehog's
rings - only this time they're crystals - that give you a second
chance when attacked (get hit and you drop your crystals, get hit
empty-handed and you die). You've also got lots and lots of
platforms to jump on.
What we have here is a generic 3D platform game - but it's very,
very cute. The supporting cast reads like the list of extras from
the Muppet Show. Big-nosed loping birdmen, strangely elfin
animals of an indeterminate species who attack by cartwheeling,
and some of the most diminutive bosses in the history of the
genre. The rocket-assisted frog whose jetpack keeps failing lends
the thankless job of video game boss a new air of pathos.
Unfortunately, the animation of each of these cuddly characters
is only nominally smooth, as they're all lacking in graphical
detail what they more than accomplish in the Puffnstuff
department. And look behind the little guys themselves, at the
backgrounds beyond, and you'll not be surprised that this is a
conversion from a 32-bit console game, with flat, dull textures.
The linchpin of any successful 3D platform-style game is the
camera angles. In order to make all those difficult jumps with
all the pitfalls that come with the third dimension, either the
camera must move automatically and miraculously line up countless
good s for you, or the game had better have generous and
versatile camera control options to be tweaked on the fly while
the action occurs. Croc has neither. Its over-the-shoulder
perspective varies wildly during play, but always seems to be
lined up wrong. Sure, sometimes the camera is directly behind
you, but more often you're stuck looking at Croc's profile, or
worse yet, the is skewed by five or ten degrees, making
accurate jumping all but impossible. Camera control is limited to
a selection of one of two nearly identical heights. Neither
selection alters radial camera placement, which is subject only
to CPU whim. If you want to rotate the camera at all, you'll have
to run in circles to trick it into place.
Camera problems are especially annoying when dealing with the
game's bosses, most of whom can be defeated with the same easy
strategy. Yep, it's Boss Design 101: Run circles around each one
until a temporary weakness reveals itself, attack, and repeat
until the boss is dead. As cute as they are, it is a shame that
the game's designers made these guys so easy to beat. The only
challenge in taking out 90 percent of them isn't a legitimate
challenge at all, it's a design flaw: The camera angles get so
out of whack with all that circular motion, that you invariably
end up with your perspective 180 degrees out of phase, running
toward the camera, looking Croc in the face as you run into the
unknown, with no way to see where the next deadly precipice or
invisible wall lies.
As though camera rotation problems weren't enough, Croc also
suffers from painfully loose control. It takes long enough to be
sure of the safety and efficacy of a basic jump without rotation
being such an issue. When your perspective is perpetually skewed
10 degrees in a random direction, every jump is a leap of faith.
Croc's response is sluggish and imprecise when he's on the
ground, and overresponsive when he's in the air. Put this all
together and it must look pretty silly: a bipedal crocodile
nervously rotating in place for several seconds before jumping
off a cliff over a floating platform, only to make a sudden
midair jag to the left and hurtle to its death.
At least Croc is long, or so it seems on the surface. With five
islands to explore, for a total of more than 40 levels, it seems
ample enough. However, the levels are small, and the scenes
usually take just a couple of tries to complete. The level design
isn't particularly inspired, either. Croc's levels all seem dull
and without any cogent sense of theme or mood. Some levels are
grassy (read: ground is green), some are deserts (read: ground is
beige), and some are icy (read: ground is white and slippery).
Regardless of color palette, type of animal nent, or special
effects, each level is ultimately only an uninteresting and
simple set of floating platforms and boxes to jump on. Maybe
there's a waterfall or something to spruce things up, but for all
its cuteness, Croc offers nowhere near the richness and thematic
diversity of Mario 64 - which is both the parent it plagiarizes
and the standard it can't live up to. --Josh Smith
Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
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