Tomba 2 is a game that has game design. It is unknown exactly what it's trying to do, but damn, it is designing its heart out. There is so much game about nothing in here, an absolutely fascinating pile of spinning wheels, fighting with controls, and weird, cozy endearment. I do not think Tomba 2 is a good game, but it's an INSANELY interesting game that I would LOVE to see anyone's impression of.
Outwardly, Tomba 2 is as close to a 2.5D platformer as you can get. You're locked to a 2D plane, but can cross over to other intersecting 2D planes whenever you come across one, giving each area this very neat sense of depth and interconnectivity. Tomba 2 then decides to couple this innovation with some absolutely lousy jumping controls. Tomba HATES the ground for some unexplained reason, and will spend as long as he can floating in the air, his prayers that he never has to hit the ground again slowing him down in midair. This is coupled with incredibly responsive midair controls that keep Tomba's momentum slip sliding all over the place, making simply jumping on anything far harder than it needs to be. Any sense of actual platforming in Tomba is an utter struggle...
... or it WOULD be, but Tomba is strikingly devoid of platforming for a platformer in its first half! There ARE jumps you need to make, but most of the difficult platforming is optional and can just be walked around, there are precious few difficult jumps you actually have to make, and enemies are generally ineffectual and easy to ignore. Tomba instead uses its level design for the sense of exploration, as surprise, the game is actually all about fetch quests! Explore the world, bring this specific thing to this specific NPC, wonder how you get a spoon lodged in between two water-filled plants and then wait for several hours as it sits in your inventory being unused without a clue as to what it should do! While this level of busywork might be off-putting, Tomba's world is actually fairly well-realized, very neatly interconnected, and the main path through it compact enough that any form of backtracking is hardly an issue. It even does the neat thing of going back to previous areas with new abilities to get new stuff, and sets that up fairly neatly!
Unfortunately, for a game all about talking to people, Tomba 2 has a REALLY rough English translation. Sure, it works well enough to convey basic information, but all dialogue is presented stiltedly, with sometimes inaccurate or very vague information on where to go. This gets especially rough the later into the game you get; whilst the game is very good at pointing you in a straight line through its world, once you've completed a loop, exactly who you have to talk to in order to do whatever becomes a rather confused game of "well just talk to everyone until you stumble into the answer".
This is ESPECIALLY trying as the game's two big objectives - the Evil Pig Door and the Secret Towers - are explicitly hidden from the player, Tomba needing to go up to the former located invisibly SOMEWHERE in the world, and if he's holding a specific item when in proximity, he'll be able to access a boss fight. The Secret Towers are even worse, with the player needing to get two special songs from sidequests per tower and just... play them. If a room seems sus? Play it. Didn't work? Move somewhere else. This creates an agonizing amount of guess work for basic progression in the case of the pig doors and secret hunting in the case of the towers, and whilst there are hints for both, the Pig Door locations suffer the most from translation issues, and said location-revealer is hidden behind a lengthy sidequest involving blooming flowers that isn't revealed to be any more important than any optional sidequest, and the towers have no better hint than an NPC in each area going "I'm looking for an invisible tower, I think it's here, better go explore every nook and cranny I guess".
And that exploration, weirdly, gets better as the game goes on. Y'see, the developers KNEW that Tomba's jump sucked, and decided to design the entire game AROUND how floaty and awkward his jump was! Power ups like the Flying Squirrel Clothes allow Tomba to glide a ridiculous horizontal distance, and the grapple allows him to... well, grappling hook his way onto most surfaces, swinging off of them to carry his momentum, which can then combo into the squirrel suit to float around. It is an incredibly weird combination where Tomba is usually not platforming, but going AROUND the platforms, abusing physics to ignore any sort of challenge beneath them. Imagine a Super Mario World where the level design was horrible to jump through, but the cape still felt good to control. That is the feeling of playing Tomba 2 at its best.
Sadly, the game does not stay at its best for long. Boss fights are incredible exercises in "why does this work like this", with elaborate platforming-based arenas constructed for Tomba to completely ignore as he patiently waits for the boss to teleport next to him, jump on their head, and throw them in a bag three times. Every single boss can be dispatched in this manner, the unique elements of their arenas entirely ignored. Tomba 2 also has mini-games, which range from innoffensive to "oh god you took the worst elements of your platforming and made a timed challenge around it" to perhaps the most brutally difficult mine cart mini-game out there. The world record speedrun finishes the mine cart course with one second to spare compared to the MINIMUM requirement to beat it. It has to be entirely learned via muscle memory, and doing it unlocks the hints for how to find the bosses... but you're not TOLD that these will unlock hints, these are just weird items in a mini-game that might or might not affect the mini-game itself for all you know! It is a backbreaking challenge of perfection, and a solid 15% of my 13-hour playthrough was just learning this mine cart game. Also you have to do it twice, and the second time is faster so it messes with your muscle memory. It's awful... I kind of love that it exists. Y'know those challenges that you hate going through, but want to see other people suffer through them? It's one of those.
The final bit I want to touch on is that this game is fully voice acted. Every single line of dialogue has voice acting that ranges from "we got a guy in the office to record these lines with no emotion whatsoever" to "actually these voice actors are making some fun choices". It is cheesy, it is endearing... it is WEIRD going from some legitimate vocal performances to some of the goofiest voices you will ever hear. All of these have very little proper direction, with some lines being perfectly delivered for their scene and others sounded like they were recorded in a vacuum just GUESSING where the line will show up. There is also an outtake left in the game where the voice actor is re-clarifying his accent and taking the line a second time. It is very funny, it is VERY endearing.
Tomba 2 is a game that only plays like Tomba 2. It is a clunky, unrefined mess that does everything it can make its good ideas try to stop being fun. But damn it, it has a LOT of ideas, like, ALL the time. It is a fascinating game where something is happening, and usually it's pretty mediocre, but there's so many things happening with so much awkward delivery that it becomes charming. Plus the international soundtrack is incredibly catchy and well-suited to its environments. Tomba 2 is a game of vibes. I don't know what those vibes are, but I want you to try them, because I want to see how you react to them.
Outwardly, Tomba 2 is as close to a 2.5D platformer as you can get. You're locked to a 2D plane, but can cross over to other intersecting 2D planes whenever you come across one, giving each area this very neat sense of depth and interconnectivity. Tomba 2 then decides to couple this innovation with some absolutely lousy jumping controls. Tomba HATES the ground for some unexplained reason, and will spend as long as he can floating in the air, his prayers that he never has to hit the ground again slowing him down in midair. This is coupled with incredibly responsive midair controls that keep Tomba's momentum slip sliding all over the place, making simply jumping on anything far harder than it needs to be. Any sense of actual platforming in Tomba is an utter struggle...
... or it WOULD be, but Tomba is strikingly devoid of platforming for a platformer in its first half! There ARE jumps you need to make, but most of the difficult platforming is optional and can just be walked around, there are precious few difficult jumps you actually have to make, and enemies are generally ineffectual and easy to ignore. Tomba instead uses its level design for the sense of exploration, as surprise, the game is actually all about fetch quests! Explore the world, bring this specific thing to this specific NPC, wonder how you get a spoon lodged in between two water-filled plants and then wait for several hours as it sits in your inventory being unused without a clue as to what it should do! While this level of busywork might be off-putting, Tomba's world is actually fairly well-realized, very neatly interconnected, and the main path through it compact enough that any form of backtracking is hardly an issue. It even does the neat thing of going back to previous areas with new abilities to get new stuff, and sets that up fairly neatly!
Unfortunately, for a game all about talking to people, Tomba 2 has a REALLY rough English translation. Sure, it works well enough to convey basic information, but all dialogue is presented stiltedly, with sometimes inaccurate or very vague information on where to go. This gets especially rough the later into the game you get; whilst the game is very good at pointing you in a straight line through its world, once you've completed a loop, exactly who you have to talk to in order to do whatever becomes a rather confused game of "well just talk to everyone until you stumble into the answer".
This is ESPECIALLY trying as the game's two big objectives - the Evil Pig Door and the Secret Towers - are explicitly hidden from the player, Tomba needing to go up to the former located invisibly SOMEWHERE in the world, and if he's holding a specific item when in proximity, he'll be able to access a boss fight. The Secret Towers are even worse, with the player needing to get two special songs from sidequests per tower and just... play them. If a room seems sus? Play it. Didn't work? Move somewhere else. This creates an agonizing amount of guess work for basic progression in the case of the pig doors and secret hunting in the case of the towers, and whilst there are hints for both, the Pig Door locations suffer the most from translation issues, and said location-revealer is hidden behind a lengthy sidequest involving blooming flowers that isn't revealed to be any more important than any optional sidequest, and the towers have no better hint than an NPC in each area going "I'm looking for an invisible tower, I think it's here, better go explore every nook and cranny I guess".
And that exploration, weirdly, gets better as the game goes on. Y'see, the developers KNEW that Tomba's jump sucked, and decided to design the entire game AROUND how floaty and awkward his jump was! Power ups like the Flying Squirrel Clothes allow Tomba to glide a ridiculous horizontal distance, and the grapple allows him to... well, grappling hook his way onto most surfaces, swinging off of them to carry his momentum, which can then combo into the squirrel suit to float around. It is an incredibly weird combination where Tomba is usually not platforming, but going AROUND the platforms, abusing physics to ignore any sort of challenge beneath them. Imagine a Super Mario World where the level design was horrible to jump through, but the cape still felt good to control. That is the feeling of playing Tomba 2 at its best.
Sadly, the game does not stay at its best for long. Boss fights are incredible exercises in "why does this work like this", with elaborate platforming-based arenas constructed for Tomba to completely ignore as he patiently waits for the boss to teleport next to him, jump on their head, and throw them in a bag three times. Every single boss can be dispatched in this manner, the unique elements of their arenas entirely ignored. Tomba 2 also has mini-games, which range from innoffensive to "oh god you took the worst elements of your platforming and made a timed challenge around it" to perhaps the most brutally difficult mine cart mini-game out there. The world record speedrun finishes the mine cart course with one second to spare compared to the MINIMUM requirement to beat it. It has to be entirely learned via muscle memory, and doing it unlocks the hints for how to find the bosses... but you're not TOLD that these will unlock hints, these are just weird items in a mini-game that might or might not affect the mini-game itself for all you know! It is a backbreaking challenge of perfection, and a solid 15% of my 13-hour playthrough was just learning this mine cart game. Also you have to do it twice, and the second time is faster so it messes with your muscle memory. It's awful... I kind of love that it exists. Y'know those challenges that you hate going through, but want to see other people suffer through them? It's one of those.
The final bit I want to touch on is that this game is fully voice acted. Every single line of dialogue has voice acting that ranges from "we got a guy in the office to record these lines with no emotion whatsoever" to "actually these voice actors are making some fun choices". It is cheesy, it is endearing... it is WEIRD going from some legitimate vocal performances to some of the goofiest voices you will ever hear. All of these have very little proper direction, with some lines being perfectly delivered for their scene and others sounded like they were recorded in a vacuum just GUESSING where the line will show up. There is also an outtake left in the game where the voice actor is re-clarifying his accent and taking the line a second time. It is very funny, it is VERY endearing.
Tomba 2 is a game that only plays like Tomba 2. It is a clunky, unrefined mess that does everything it can make its good ideas try to stop being fun. But damn it, it has a LOT of ideas, like, ALL the time. It is a fascinating game where something is happening, and usually it's pretty mediocre, but there's so many things happening with so much awkward delivery that it becomes charming. Plus the international soundtrack is incredibly catchy and well-suited to its environments. Tomba 2 is a game of vibes. I don't know what those vibes are, but I want you to try them, because I want to see how you react to them.