HumaNature Studios’ Toe Jam & Earl: Back in the Groove has brought back and breathed life into the old gameplay design of the original game. It feels like a Toe Jam & Earl game, which I can appreciate immensely. While not groundbreaking with visuals, it still brings some real fun to a series that lost its way a long time ago.
Whatcha doing there, HumaNature Studios? You trying to recapture the majesty and beauty of a 90s game that seemingly went downhill with every iteration after the first? Do you honestly think that your studio can take a cult classic like T&J, find a bottle of magic, open it, and bring back everything that gamers from the 90s loved about the original game? No way. Uh-uh. Never going to happen.
Except you did.
Way back in the early 90s, when I was 13, I spent the better part of my evenings on the weekend trying to down dozens and dozens of levels on the original Sega Genesis classic Toe Jam & Earl. Fighting off smart professors dressed as carrots, avoiding Boogie Men, and trying to decide on whether to get too close to the edge of a board to see if the land would magically appear was essentially the name of the original game. It was creative. It was nearly endless. It was also fun as shit to play with a friend in split-screen mode. I’m not sure that I ever recovered all the parts of Toe Jam and Earl’s ship, which was the goal of the game so the goobers could get home, but the game didn’t really push you to do that, rather it just fed you humor and dumb fun. That’s what made it a classic.
Then the dark times happened. Two additional T&J games came out, tried to break away from the formula of the original and use the power of whatever platform it was being pushed on to reinvent a wheel that was clearly not broken. Sega made a lot of shit decisions during this time period, and much like the sequels to the original T&J, they didn’t pan out. The series went away thanks to the ill-fated two sequels, and then it was never heard from again…or so we thought.
Fast-forward nearly a couple of decades, HumaNature Studios hath brought us the wheel our squeaky entertainment was born upon, with some improvements to keep the content fresh. Does it all work? For the most part, but the satisfaction of seeing the old gameplay structure in place might be reason enough to take a chance on this release.
Toe Jam & Earl: Back in the Groove almost verbatim takes what the original was composed of and recreates it. You get the same 90s looking landscape that is floating in space, which expands when it needs to in the game to reveal an even larger board. You get gifts laying around everywhere, which feature wacky hightop shoes, random presents, and even Icarus wings to fly around for a limited period of time. You get the same awkward level view, which the first game contained, where everything is at an angle, which adds some challenge to some specific movements (or fall offs). Heck, you even get the same boogie man from the original, which is equally as fast and terrifying as he was in the 90s. You even get the same goal, which is to find ship pieces on each level and progress further until you head back home. A lot of attributes of the original game make up the construction of the gameplay design, which isn’t a bad thing at all. Like mentioned above, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? For a 90s gamer like myself, this is heaven in every sense of the word. It’s what I believe that most fans of the series really wanted in the previous games. It certainly makes the series fun again, something that cannot be said for previous installments. But is that good enough to warrant a purchase? Especially for those of you who have never played the game before? Well, that depends on what your expectations are of the game.
The gameplay design is pure fun. It’s wacky, zany, and it plays within the confines of what made the original great. Outside of the old faithful gameplay design, HumaNature Studios didn’t rest on its laurels with ‘just good enough’. One of the bigger new pieces of the game is upgrading your character, which you can do as you accomplish certain tasks to earn XP. This could be evading an enemy, finding things in a random tree/bush, or just accomplishing certain goals within the game. The XP adds up quick, and to use it you find a professor on the board to help you upgrade your character attributes. It’s a very simplistic RPG style design, but nonetheless something new for the game series. This adds some depth to take the game out of the 16-bit era it was born in and helps to mix it to give you motivation and additional goals to do well in the game. You have to have this for a game to survive nowadays, especially for a game series as old as this one. Having extra motivation to keep going, to keep playing, to keep wanting to play is important. That’s how good games survive for a while.
Beyond upgrading your character, there are also mini-games within the game, such as jamming out with one of the aliens and playing a mini-Dance Dance Revolution. You press buttons on the controller to mimic a DDR-like event, in hopes of doing well. This will earn you money, which you want to have in order to access special talents from specially talented characters. Oh, we haven’t discussed them. There are special NPC characters all over the levels. Each one, for the right price, can help your alien buddies out to progress in the game in some way, shape, or fashion. Sometimes it as simple as receiving presents for money, sometimes it is just earning a nice quiet peace of mind. Sometimes it is healing, and sometimes it’s leveling. There are a variety of these characters throughout the game, which are marked by sparkly glitter around them. They add a bit more flavor to the overall meal that is Toe Jam & Earl: Back in the Groove. They certainly add a new element of strategy, though not a particularly deep strategy, as you can use them to quickly get past enemies or just simply make your character better. Again, this is another layer of motivation in the game that keeps you engaged to it. It makes the game just a tad deeper and more interesting.
While this is an improvement, and it fits within the scope of the game’s design, in my opinion, the enjoyment of this game lies within its 90s foundation — fun. Ultimately, the gameplay, even with the new stuff, doesn’t stray too far away from the original shell. The game does try to give you more options by adding additional characters you can play, but the same construct is very much intact. And for the third time, that’s not a bad thing, as having fun in games is what a game should be about.
All of that said, one aspect of the game which I’m still indifferent about is the looks. I’m not sure what I was expecting, maybe my 90s gamer heart wanted a Genesis-esque graphics package, but the animation and style are a little clunky. It works, it still captures the overall feel of nostalgia, but it feels too Adobe Flash to me. It’s not a distraction from the solid gameplay, but it certainly doesn’t do it any favors on the eyes. The character design is at least on par with the gameplay construct’s attitude of ‘far out’ there look and feel, but the animation just feels a bit disjointed at times. It certainly isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but I wish they had gone a bit more traditional with the visuals. Everyone loves pixels, right? Next time, pixels!!!
Overall, HumaNature Studios’ Toe Jam & Earl: Back in the Groove has brought back and breathed life into the old gameplay design of the original game. It feels like a Toe Jam & Earl game, which I can appreciate immensely. While not groundbreaking with visuals, it still brings some real fun to a series that lost its way a long time ago.
