Croc: Legend Of The Gobbos Remaster - Croc Of Shit (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- Apr 16
- 5 min read
Croc: Legend of the Gobbos
Released: September 26th 1997 (original), April 2nd 2025
Developer: Argonaut Software, Titanium Studios, Big Boat Interactive
Publisher: Fox Studios, Argonaut Games
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch, Xbox Series
I’ll level with you - I can’t say I ever bore a great fondness for Croc. Among mascot platformers, Legend of the Gobbos stands out in no appreciable way. As a character, Croc lacks personality and he’s visually unremarkable. Plus his game has fucking tank controls, what the fuck?
Legend of the Gobbos’ remastered release shines a light on why Croc never became a household name. With those rotten controls mercifully fixed, there’s nothing to distract from all the other ways in which this game failed to hold up both now and back then.
Rudimentary map design is married to gameplay that’s destitute in terms of features and variety. Audiovisual feedback is so threadbare it comes off as unfinished. Stage backdrops are plain voids, with some stages having almost no environmental features at all. Croc is an abundance of nothing.
While it’s tempting to use age as an excuse, it’s worth bearing in mind that Croc released in 1997, a year after such titles as Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider.
Even for its time, Legend of the Gobbos did little to leave an impression. Dressing the mutton as lamb not only fails to improve matters, it’s made them worse. What we have here is an interesting example of a game actually suffering from visual improvement.
While it was crudely simplistic even back in the day, classic PSX graphics at least contextualize Croc’s inadequacies, flagging it as a product of its time. Robbed of the retro polygons that provide a modicum of forgiveness, Croc resembles shovelware cobbled together from Unity assets in an afternoon.
To be clear, I’m talking in pure aesthetic terms here. I’m not saying Croc is lazy Steam fodder, nor am I saying the new graphics are inherently bad. My problem is this - by remastering such a simplistic PSX game without embellishing anything else, the overhaul is utterly detrimental.
What we have here is a paint job that retains the empty, uninspired nature of environments and characters. There’s no extra scenery, no added detail. Even worse, by smoothing everything out, the remaster removes elements that added texture to the textures. It’s easily observable since you can instantly switch between old and new graphics.
The jagginess of PSX textures added depth. Pixels and artifacts gave the illusion of detail to otherwise completely flat surfaces, even if it was an incidental consequence of 90s graphical limitations.
Those limitations don’t just add texture, they hide undesirable details the remaster has exposed. Gloopy pools are made out of arranged tiles with animated ripples that don’t line up properly. When these tiles are smoothed and flattened, the bisected ripples are obvious. You can see it on the PSX version if you look for it, but you can’t not see it in the remaster.
Character models do a little better, but have one major issue when it comes to their limbs. The makeover doesn’t do anything to obscure the original models’ awkwardly segmented body parts, which is seen especially on Croc’s elbows. Again, it looks all the worse for smoothing it out.
One has to wonder if Croc was remastered with the knowledge that classic graphics looked better, given how easily you can toggle various visual features on and off.
The options menu provides an interesting feature - you can toggle the visuals for models and textures separately, meaning you could have a PSX Croc in a remastered environment and vice versa. Enhanced lighting is its own setting as well, and I can at least say light is one area in which this release has added a positive contribution.
In a game that would have actually benefited from a remaster, these individual toggles are a great idea.
You’ll notice I’ve not focused on gameplay at all, and that’s because of how little I care to say about it. There’s barely anything worth mentioning in the original version, let alone a replication of it.
Yes, Croc does play better since at last receiving sensible movement controls, upgrading from miserable to playable. Graduating to viable, however, doesn’t mean it isn’t still an aggressively mediocre game.
Croc still has prehistoric 3D platforming with uninteresting puzzles. It still has a dreadful tail swipe that comes with no audiovisual impact, feels like it barely contacts, and has a range so short as to be treacherous. It still has those shitty little inclines that make you slide into dangerous waters if you so much as graze them.
Bosses are particularly horrendous, and I don’t just mean they look like they were drawn by a three-year-old.
Every boss fight is basically the same routine of baiting sluggish attacks before awkwardly hitting back. Battles feel slow and dragged out despite their actual brevity. Victory is embarrassingly unceremonious - the moment you score the final blow, both Croc and the boss will freeze in place, standing like statues while the “level complete” message pops up.
Like I said earlier, even for 1997 this was pitiful. In 2025 it’s something you’d expect to see from an asset flip.
If you want to have a worse time, the D-pad provides instant access to the older, infinitely stupider tank input. It’s the kind of thing you’d try for a few seconds as a novelty before never wanting to play a platformer that way ever again.
Audio’s lackluster, with effects that sound like they’d rather be doing something else. Music tracks are pleasant the first time you hear them, but so many are just variations of a single tune, and even those are repeated across multiple consecutive stages.
The remaster includes some old concept art and shit like that. No features that would make the game better, sadly.
Croc: Legend of the Gobbos needed much more than the veneer it’s received. It was dated out of the gate and aged like milk thereafter. With visual upgrades that inadvertently make it look worse, and no improvements to the clumsy gameplay beyond fixing its abysmal controls, this is the definition of an unnecessary product.
Some retro games require a little work to bring them up to standard, and Croc required far more than that. Without the extra effort, we’re left with a reminder that, honestly, Legend of the Gobbos just wasn’t a good game.
5/10
