Review for ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove. Game for Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 01/03/2019
Rogue nostalgia. Paraphrasing the famous tune of that semprecaromifuquest'ermocolle by Al Bano, many times memories can do more damage than a selfie of Zaniolo's mother. And we are not talking, as in that case, in problems related to the retinas for onanistic-compulsive activities, no sir, we are in fact referring to deeper and more rooted problems, strictly related to the cardiovascular system.
Playing Toejam & Earl: Back in the Groove is like suffering a goal in the 90th minute, like discovering that you have been duped by any street vendor, believing you have bought a Gucci after paying a handful of sonorous euros. Playing ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove is a bitter disappointment.
And it is with deep bitterness that to see that, never as in this case, what could have worked twenty years ago, now no longer works. ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove is a project born on Kickstarter almost five years ago by a team of just three individuals, and the low expectations that surrounded the project at the time of its first reveal are reflected in the current values of title production. It seems like we went back to the 90s in the worst possible way, with an isometric work simply out of any possible grace of any divinity willing to spend for it.
The gameplay of ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove turns out to be as basic as possible, proposing a sequence of levels one basically equal to the other, characterized by a rate of explorability inversely proportional to the enjoyment provided during their playthrough. Various yawns and snuffles are sporadically interrupted by some hilarious gag staged by the game's protagonists, but everything turns out to be an end in itself, sterile and blatantly subdued. Wandering in the air, looking for one of the collectibles required to continue the adventure in the vain waiting to find the elevator capable of transporting the unfortunate gamer to the next scheme, turns out to be a practice not very suitable for a person in the fullest of his mental faculties , unless you seek pleasure through the pain of dealing with masochistically uninteresting levels.
Talking about the technical realization, then, it is again highlighted how ToeJam, Earl and company singer would have done better to remain confined to the drawer of the memories of each of us, proposing a final result that defining undertone is somewhat euphemistic. Even if the style that distinguishes the purulent series signed by Greg Johnson does not help, obviously aiming at a surreal, minimalist declination of an alien fantastic dimension, it is undeniable and evident the insufficient commitment lavished in the attempt to free the work from a rotting how obviously inevitable fate. Few animation frames, few colors, few sprites worthy of note: little, too little.
The only glimmer of slight satisfaction came from the implementation of a multiplayer mode, even online, capable of supporting up to four players at the same time. The problem is that the base is one of the worst possible and even the pleasure of spending time in the company of other human beings disappears after a while. Within the production there are some mini games all marked by a qualitatively poor implementation, with a value attributable to the whole product: for the record, for example, facing a squalid rhythm game session within a production so clumsily sculpted it substantiates even more vigorously the cloying properties of ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove.
Gagging, vigorous farts and megagalactic burps. No, it is not the remake of one of the very first Fantozzi and it is not even a referential reference to the attitude of the game's protagonists to release flatulence and so on and so forth. Instead, it is the reaction that the most sensitive of gamers could have in front of a production that, given the results, would have done better to remain confined in the memory of each of us.
► ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove is an Adventure-indie-Music game developed and published by Adult Swim Games for Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the game was released on 01/03/2019
