Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

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Title: Toejam and Earl: Back in the Groove

Platform: Nintendo Switch

What is it? The fourth game in the long dormant SEGA-associated series. Unlike the other sequels, the gameplay loop in BitG is extremely similar to the very first Toejam and Earl game, making it the first true follow-up to the original with rougelike game design, an isometric camera, randomized elements every playthrough (in certain modes, at least), and a focus on co-op play.

Level of completion: I've completed every mode in the game at least once (Tutorial, Fixed World, Random World, and Hardcore Random World), and a few multiple times (three or so completed playthroughs in Fixed; five or so in Random). I've unlocked several of the unlockables, including most of the hidden presents, all of the extra characters, and a good chunk of the total available power hats.

What I liked:

• Unlike the other sequels, this one is almost identical to the Sega Genesis original on a structural level. Like in that game, you'll be finding unidentified presents, hunting for ship pieces, avoiding bad Earthlings, and generally trying to survive over the course of 25 levels so that you can reassemble your entire ship and make your way home. It feels familiar, yet also fresh thanks to the numerous changes that have been made.
• This game is a lot more interactive than the original, and you're continually engaging with objects in your environment to find money and presents. A particularly interesting example of this are parking meters and buttons; as you interact with these (you have to pay money to interact with the meters, unless you play as one particular character), more will pop up throughout the level, and this daisy chain of interactive objects leads to... something. Sometimes food. Sometimes a present. Sometimes an unlockable. Sometimes money. Sometimes a dangerous earthling. It's a crapshoot, but one that is persistently rewarding enough to be absolutely essential.
• A number of new and returning (excursions into the "hyperfunk zone" from Panic on Funkotron, for example) mini-games make solo play feel much more diverse and engaging than it was in the original.
• Unique stat builds and special abilities make the different characters feel pretty unique; much moreso than the original, which was limited to a fast character with a small health bar and a slow character with a larger health bar.
• Unlike in the original, where only walking apparently helped to level up your character, you're constantly gaining XP from pretty much everything you do in this game. You can also easily monitor how far away you are from a promotion.
• Building off the last observation, you don't just level up automatically now. Once your XP meter is full, you have to find a carrot man to upgrade you manually. This leads to that particular earthling being a LOT more common in this game. Considering how crucial it is in both this one and the original to identify presents so that you know what to look for and have a decent assortment of items going into the endgame levels, I like that they majorly reduced the randomness of his presence in the game. He even shows up on the in-game map!
• I love that they randomly reward you with something extra every time you rank up, whether it's money, an extra life, a present, bonus XP, etc.
• Many of the unlockables are items that can be accessed and used in subsequent playthroughs, and this helps to make replaying the game over and over feel more rewarding than in the original game. The power hats, in particular, can have a really powerful impact on how you play.
• The present system has been revamped in certain ways, and I really like the level of nuance and strategic depth opened up by it. So, in this game, presents can be "amped." They can already be amped, it can randomly apply to a present in a given level, or you can choose to use an "amp present" item to do so. What this does is significantly boost the effects of whatever you're using it on, good or bad. Now, the interesting thing about this is that it can be a double-edged sword. If you amp the total bummer, for example, it still kills you, but it also creates an effect that kills the things around you, so it could easily be used as a sort of kamikaze attack if you're especially desperate to rid yourself of enemies. This sort of thing applies to other presents as well: the mean rocket skates, for example, send you flying around a level out of control, like in the original game. But, in this entry, they can be used as a defensive tool (if you ram into an enemy with rocket skates attached, it sends them flying, and you can use this to push them over the edges of the map), or, like in the original, an exploration aid (gigantic levels with a ton of water become much smaller when you're flying around like a jet and uncovering most of the map in the process). There have also been a bunch of new presents added, and a lot of older ones have been tweaked (the "Tomato Rain" present is actually really useful now!). Presents can also break, and, if you use one that's broken, there's a chance it'll explode and hurt you instead of activating its effects. But you can also fix presents. It's just a lot more involved than the original in this regard.
• Finally, the music in this game is pretty good. It's the same sort of hip-hop as in the original, but with actual instruments and, in terms of the title theme, lyrics. Much of it is remixed from tracks in the original game as well. Overall, it just fits well.

What I disliked:

• The art style is cheap and tacky looking. It looks like a flash game from Newgrounds. Also, the walking cycle of the characters are floaty enough that it can be difficult to tell when they get near the edge of a piece of land. In general, it's just not a great-looking game.
• The enemy models are simply way too big, considering the size of the map. the screen, and the number of them you'll encounter. Just a few of them can clutter up the land and make avoiding damage from them impossible, which is especially problematic on higher difficulties. And when a ton of them DO come on-screen? Boy, things quickly devolve into absolute visual chaos. Shrinking these models by 25% or so would do a world of good for the rest of the game.
• Despite the presence of stats and diversity of builds between the characters, the speed of enemy earthlings and the amount of damage they can do in a single attack unbalances the stats and makes fast characters like Toejam objectively superior despite the areas they're lacking in. This problem is compounded on hard difficulty and/or hardcore random mode, where enemies can kill you in a hit or two. Speed is simply vastly more important than everything else.
• The map system is hot garbage in co-op. Unlike the original, where you toggle a full-screen map in both single and multi-player modes, here you can toggle a (borderline useless) mini-map, and if you hold down a button, toggle it to a full-screen map. The map is detailed and works well in single-player mode (even if it's annoying having to hold a button to keep it full-screen), but, in co-op, the map never goes full-screen, and the bigger map is still tiny. This makes trying to see where things are on the map miserable in co-op. Considering how often you have to consult the map in these games, it's a big design flaw.
• While the mini-games bring some diversity to the gameplay in solo mode, they actively detract from the game in co-op. It's really irritating, for example, when someone goes into the hyperfunk zone, and the other player is ripped away from the normal course of gameplay to participate as well. It's also no fun having to wait for someone else to complete rhythm games.
• The meter they designed to show when a present's effect is about to wear off is... weird in this game, and it's difficult to read. The original's flashing icon in the HUD immediately communicated that an effect was about to wear off. I don't know why they changed this simple but effective system.
• Tomatoes as a weapon were nerfed in this game, for whatever reason. They're borderline useless, which is unfortunate, as they were quite useful in the original.
• Same with decoys. They barely even seem to work most of the time.
• There are times that the 'unique' sense of humor in the game becomes a bit overbearing: for example, when you select your difficulty, you have a basic choice of easy, normal, and hard. Easy is just... ridiculously so. It's an insult to anyone who isn't a small child. Hard difficulty, what I tend to play on, really bumps up the damage numbers and is a bit too much for people not as accustomed to difficult video games, I've found. The normal difficulty (called "easy-farty"), then, is the most accessible, but if you select it, your character runs around the entire game stopping every ten feet or so and farting. It's weird, dangerous if you're being pursued by an enemy, and punishes the player for the sake of a cheap joke.
• Speaking of the difficulty in this game, it's all over the place. In general, it's vastly easier than the original game, until enemies litter the screen and it suddenly feels impossible. The original had a nice, smooth ramp-up in difficulty over the course of the game. Also the way "Hardcore random mode" handles difficulty is lazy. It just makes enemies hit harder and causes the more dangerous ones to spawn earlier in the game. No unique mechanics, environments, A.I. settings, etc.
• The composer for the game likes to name-drop himself and stages a sort of "celebrity cameo" at the end of the game. It's annoying and sticks out in a way I didn't care for. I don't care about this guy, and I don't need him grandstanding in my game. Thankfully, the important backers are much more carefully handled, and are relegated to little islands that you can choose to visit or not (they're always worth visiting, though, because you AT LEAST get a pair of icarus wings, which, like in the original, is the most important item in the game).
• This might just be a problem with the Switch version, but the performance leaves something to be desired. Putting aside the extreme lagginess in the elevator cutscenes, there are sharp, momentary frame-rate drops throughout the game that seem to happen at random. It's not a huge deal when nothing is happening on-screen, but when an enemy is hot on your tail, it can lead to a cheap death. Performance seems identical in handheld mode, though, which is always nice.

Final thoughts: The game is quite a bit of fun, but it also has a lot of design flubs that bring it down. This is unfortunate, as most of these seem like they'd be pretty easily addressable in a patch. The fundamentals of the gameplay are solid, and it's easily the best sequel in the series, but there are too flaws for this to replace the original game for me.

Score: 7/10