Shining example of the drain-circling vibes of the 3d collectathon era. Pains to think how many 2d platformer studios -- original Gex is a completely serviceable platformer -- were shoved onto the 3d bandwagon. The quips are exhausting; the twin terrors of bad camera and jumping puzzles are a nightmare, something that even flagship 3d platformer Mario 64 didn't master. It's fascinating to watch a younger generation uncover these games and see them as endearing relics of videogame history. Having lived through this era, I want to leave this genre in a tomb.

it has super mario 64 loosely draped over it, but in reality this is meat-and-potatoes platforming platforming: linear levels, hazards galore, and not a single NPC in sight. would be fair to say it has quite a lot of crash in its DNA, although gex completely jettisons the on-rails setup of crash in favor of more spacious locales. to try to wed its two influences, gex tends to set up its areas as narrow gauntlets at the start with forks in the road around the middle of the level so you can access each objective (red remotes that serve as this game's equivalents of mario's stars). for the majority of objectives, which slap a series of platforming challenges in front of a red remote, this is more than serviceable. it becomes more tedious when occasional objectives require you to find X number of thingamabobs strewn throughout a level; in these you get the unenviable chore of playing the same level forwards and backwards, swinging the camera around in the hope that you'll see a thingamabob tucked behind a wall. this is not to say that gex doesn't have some tricks up its sleeve: the early level Out of Toon starts off with a wide open area for its collectable jaunts (and a hidden silver remote too!) before tightening into a line for the rest of its duration, and the more experimental level Poltergex from late in the game provides a haunted mansion locale with doubly-layered rooms, giving two stacked paths that combine and loop back with a couple of branches off at key points (including a secret third and fourth layer of rooms on top). perhaps this game would be more interesting if it leaned more into these styles of level-building that took more advantage of the full 3D space.

gex's toolkit is brief and functional: he gets a tail bounce after any starting jump, and he gets a flying kick that gives a quick burst of speed while tying him to a particular direction momentarily. these are small additions to an otherwise standard run/jump/tailspin verb set, although the smooth implementation allows for seamless transitions and minor momentum conservation to those looking to speed up their gameplay. the obstacles in each level follow suit, providing a nice overview of traditional 3D platformer obstacles at this nascent point in their history. there are seven primary locales with a handful of levels each that reappear over the course of the game, and thus the gimmicks from earlier ones tend to be iterated upon for later entries. the best of these is probably the Circuit Central stages, which have a variety of manipulable platforms for the player to move across its vertically focused areas, such as a platform that rotates around a center pillar until it is struck, sending the platform off in its tangential direction. these levels also center an time-based energy power-up that allows gex to turn on other platforms and walkways when in contact with them. most other level gimmicks are cycle-based: flying table/drawer-platforms in the haunted mansion areas, rotating flat platforms suspended in air in the space areas, dripping lava in the prehistoric areas. very traditional platformer design, but at the same time it becomes hard to tell which of these were really new ideas in '98 when thinking through the slurry of platformers I've played from this period. it becomes even harder when said challenges are seemingly dropped at random throughout a level without real mechanical through-lines to grasp onto.

I went in thinking the voice lines would be trite, but they verge on nonsensical; it sort of presages a family guy-esque "look at the reference!" formula without the nicety of setting up some punchline in the process. gex rarely emotes anything relevant to the situation (outside of an eyebrow-raising chinese accent in the Kung-Fu Theater areas), instead preferring to sing bars from schoolhouse rock songs or drop random schwarznegger lines. or he just says "it's tail time!" over and over and over again. wanted to dunk on the simpsons writer who apparently penned much of this, Robert Cohen, but looked into his history and found out that his one primary simpsons episode credit was.... Flaming Moe's. very unfortunate, because that episode is a series-defining classic.

one immutable thing about gex is that, whether you love him or hate him, if you grew up in the 90s and played video games, you probably know him. this was back during the mystical bygone era of the midbudget title, back when games were allowed to be shamelessly inspired by other groundbreaking ones (in this case, super mario 64) and they were allowed to just try to ape the design as best they could. and as much of a meme as the "15 million sales" claim is, gex was still a memorable entity, even in the peripheral. it's '98-'00, you go to blockbuster, look at all the games available for rent, and even if you didn't rent gex: enter the gecko, the box art with gex in a dynamic and memorable pose stuck with you. i think something like this is one of the largest reasons gex has endured as a recognizable mascot, even if it is almost entirely ironically. but, irony can only get you so far, and there is genuinely goodwill for these games that has also endured for a lot of people, myself included.

it's fun coming back to these games i played disposably as a child and actually trying to assess the game design and development/production aspects that i would've otherwise never contemplated. in particular, i'm able to say that gex: enter the gecko actually has some fairly solid level design. the levels are engaging, they have loads of landmarks that help the player not only mentally map out a level, but also create memorable platforming segments. these don't always pan out, and i'm not going to sit here and tell you that every single level is a homerun, but there's definitely more interesting and memorable levels than there aren't. in particular, i think some of my favorites are poltergext, mazed and confused, samurai night fever, frankensteinfeld, and fine tooning. each of them has either some genuinely creative design or otherwise memorable platforming sequences that help put this game ever so slightly above the other contemporaries trying to replicate grab the super mario 64 crowd. tell me, does anyone still feel this passionately about croc or, god forbid, bubsy?

it's not all roses down memory lane. anyone who's played this knows and will tell you the camera is angry video game nerd voice like piss soup seasoned with wet diarrhea. the best you can hope for is to set it to manual and just babysit the damn fucking thing as much as you can, and even then, the game still fights you tooth and nail whenever you try to adjust it with a wall anywhere near it. it's not only made the game aged incredibly poorly, but it was something that, on launch, made the game stumble out of the gate. gex: enter the gecko is actually enjoyable in those moments you can escape the burden of camera control and just mock the stupid shitty and sometimes vaguely racist things gex says. there's probably a good argument to make that this game is one of the better mascot platformers of the time because there was at least a solid design foundation here. i don't adore gex in the way that i could really defend his games to anyone who didn't grow up with a playstation/N64, but there is value in them.

if nothing else, this game takes a lot of swings and most of them hit in some capacity. again, we're not dealing with high water mark platformer territory here, but this is fun in a very approachable and simple way. just remember to forget about the camera as much as you can.

The camera is dogged by every problem that 3D cameras had during this generation AND honks at you like a pervert whenever it refuses to cooperate. Agonizing. This rigidity does enable inspired uses of perspective from time to time, but they're not frequent enough to be worth it.

It would be one thing if the jokes were merely bad; instead, they are bad, repeated ad nauseam, and don't even make sense half the time. "This is like an all-nighter at Richard Simmons' house," Gex quips while in the technology world. What? That is not even a joke; that's saying "Richard Simmons" and hoping someone will laugh. I mostly played this to see if it tapped into its cultural moment in a way that justified its solid sales, but it truly is just a Super Mario 64 clone that feels like it was conceived and orchestrated by someone in the beginning stages of a dissociative disorder. Imagine meeting an unironic Gex fan in the wild. Chilling.

Memes aside, this game is kind of just barely passable for a 3D platformer. It's nothing groundbreaking.

Gex controls decently well, and I think his moveset is pretty tight once you master it. However, the camera in this game can be absolutely horrific, like really bad, and the only way to kind of fix it is to switch between the manual and automatic camera modes whenever it gets stuck.

I like the design of a decent amount of the worlds you need to traverse through. Some great ones that come to mind are the Kung-Fu world and the Bugs Bunny themed world. However, there are also ones I absolutely fucking hated, like the computer circuit world and the outer space one.

The music is passable, but honestly I don't remember much of it besides the tracks in the first few worlds, which might be a pretty telling sign that the songs don't really go too hard in this game.

Boss battles can actually be a lot of fun in this game. I especially love the fight where you control Gexzilla. But oh my God, the final boss is complete bullshit and I will never forget the countless attempts it took me to beat it.

Initially I was going to rate this game 3 stars, but as I typed out this review I realized this game was not as good as I first thought. It's not horrible, but there are so many other great platformers you could play instead, and this one hasn't aged very well.

Loved this when I was a child and still enjoyed it a lot now but it has some issues that I can't ignore.

I'm a big fan of Gex as a character and I actually enjoy all the references and his silly one liners. Level design is good and I really like the themes. However, there could be more variety since a lot of the themes repeat themselves too often. My biggest problem is the camera though. They didn't manage to get that right at all, it's always in the wrong place and some passages get unnecessarily hard just because you can't see anything although this is a fairly easy game in general. It actually gets so annoying that it really reduces the fun a lot and the worst thing is the stupid sound everytime you try to move the camera in a place where it is stuck. Ugh.

I still think the average rating on Backloggd is too low, Gex deserves some love and these issues could easily be fixed with a well done remake.

I honestly thought this wasn’t going to be that bad. I mean we all like to make our jokes about the Gex series but I thought there would be SOMETHING to like here. It all comes down to the level design. Levels have multiple objectives, but often just place them Wherever instead of having clear sections for different objectives. It’s like if someone translated the level design of bad Amiga maze platformers into 3D, it’s impressive to see someone fuck up the collect-a-thon format this bad. Super Mario 64 had so many mountain levels for a reason, this is like if those were made completely flat and spread out as to be made as tedious as possible. I got my head i my hands here, I didn’t think I would end up preferring Gex 1 to this. Let’s hope Gex 3 has anything worth salvaging or else the next person I see shitposting about Gex is getting fucking choked. I never want to hear anyone invoke that devil.