A lame story, horrid camera and uneven difficulty bring down Croc 2's generally child-friendly gameplay.
The mean green villain Baron Dante has been resurrected (as you do) by his red polygonal minions and is on the rampage once again, plotting evil against the cute, furry Gobbos. Meanwhile, Croc has discovered- thanks to an encounter on the shore with a message in a bottle- that his long-lost parents are searching for him. With the blessings of the Gobbo King Rufus, Croc sets out on a quest to discover his paternity, and save the Gobbos form oblivion once again. The plot is recycled and linear; the whole family dynamic does nothing to actually affect the way the story turns out. Also, I really wish the characters would just speak English! Their constant squeaking and chirping is endearing at first, but gets old fast.
Croc 2 tries a different system to its predecessor when it comes to level selection. Instead of dropping straight into a level, the game introduces Villages which act as hubs for your missions. There are four Villages in total, Sailor, Cossack, Caveman and Inca. Each has their own personality and quirky Gobbos to interact with. There are usually one or two activities in the Village you can participate in to get some nice goodies. You can also visit Swap Meet Pete, who will sell you various goods to help you in your mission. To buy these goods, you will need to earn Crystals in each level.
The levels themselves are a bit hit and miss. The first few are ordinary fair, get from A to B, collect x amount of y, but some of them are nicely done and are worth doing again if you need to earn more Crystals. The Amazonian waterfall level and the baby mammoth level were two such examples. Also in each level are five coloured Crystals, often in hard to reach places. If you collect all five, you are transported into an area with a Golden Gobbo, where you will have the chance to collect the aforementioned trophy. The game splits itself evenly between simple combat, platforming and puzzle solving. Unfortunately, the offset in this is that you can't save during a level, only in a Village. You do have a certain amount of Hearts to get you through each level, and the amount of these increases as you go on, but if you run out it means back to the starting line, punk. There is also the odd vehicle level thrown in, but they're cheap and repetitive, downright boring in my book. Bosses require a re-think in tactics and are interesting enough as a whole, but individually forgettable. Like the original, enemies respawn, but usually don't present much of a challenge.
Graphically, Croc 2 looks very nice. Most of the grainy textures and jaggies from the original have been smoothed over. The bright colours and environments are attractive, although the harsh yellow tones of sand can make your eyes water at times. The cutscenes look great and the game as a whole is relatively bug-free. The camera is okay when you're running in a straight line, but tends to go spastic as soon as you round a corner or jump on a rope. There's no way to control this so you'll just have to live with it. Music and sound effects are okay, but I still think that the characters would be so much more convincing, and indeed attractive if they just spoke English. It's hard to take a boss seriously when their speech sounds like wind escaping a balloon. Each level has its own music which is boppy and enjoyable enough, but not something you'd put on your iPod. The controls work well but are a little unresponsive with jumps at times.
And now for the biggest gripe of all, the difficulty. I am not kidding when I say it took me 43 days to complete one level in this game. 43 days! I'm not a noob or anything, I've been playing platformers for years but this was just outrageous. It's off-putting when you've been going through a game nicely and suddenly it throws a fiendishly hard boss like the giant Venus fly-trap at you. This is a kid's game for goodness sake! The difficulty is way out of whack for some parts of the game. The final level is really a combination of several levels containing some tedious puzzles that annoyed me from the get-go. This is only made worse by the camera and the no-saving feature. There's no mini-map, so levels such as the maze level are an out-and-out pain.
Croc 2 is quite lengthy for a platformer, clocking in at 15-20 hours. This can only be a good thing but you get the feeling that a lot of this is due to the games inconsistent difficulty. In case you're wondering, collecting all the Golden Gobbos in a Village will open the Golden Gobbo level, completing these four levels successfully opens up more bonus levels to do. However, these are really irrelevant to both the game and the story and feel a little tacked on, although they do give you something to aim for. The new gadgets you can use in the levels are disappointing, they can help you jump higher and reach hidden platforms, but that's about it. The game has little replay value once you've completed it 100%.
Croc 2 was a dire disappointment for me. Not only was the story unfulfilling, the gameplay was often frustrating and as a whole it just feels a little empty. For every new feature it introduces, another inconsistency holds it back. Unless you're a diehard fan of Croc or you have a prodigious platforming child, you're going to find it amusing at best, nigh unplayable at worst. And it's a real shame considering the weight this title holds. As far as I'm concerned, Croc has officially lost his mojo.