It’s now time for Level Up season 2. After a full year, I got to say, I’m pretty pleased with where it’s been going and how it’s turned out. And to think, it all started with a review of Earthworm Jim. Some of you might be wondering why I picked that for my first one? Simply put, I think it captured the feeling I wanted for this show (a little funny, but good overall). So naturally, with Level Up season 2, I have to pay homage to that first review. Here’s Earthworm Jim 2, once again available for a lot of consoles, but I’ll be playing it on the Sega Genesis.
The story is pretty much the same, but with the omission of Queen-blah-blah-Slug-For-A-Slug (yeah, so much for being the final boss, eh?). This time, Psycrow has decided to capture Princess-What’s-Her-Name just too basically be a douche towards our wormy hero. It’s pretty much standard, which I guess was the point since, like the first game, it was supposed to parody the other “save the girl games” of the time. The one thing I don’t like about the story is that it omits a lot of the funny characters (like Prof. Monkey-For-A-Head) and doesn’t add enough new characters. The few that it does add, like Pedro Pupa and Flamin’ Yawn, are a little faceless (literally in their cases). This game’s story just doesn’t live up to the expectations that the first game set up.
In my review of the first game, I mentioned that the levels have a lot of variety to them. This time, it’s more like the makers had a PHOBIA of repeating themselves. The first level you’ll ride up some stares using a chair lift at one point. Next level you have to dig though some dirt using your gun, then you’re a blind cave salamander floating in a digestive system, then you’re flying over a world on your pocket rocket, then you’ll need to save cows to get through and after that you’ll inflate your head to float to the top of a level. Seriously, those are the first 6 levels of the game in order, minus the Puppy Love intervals. This does demonstrate one awesome thing: only Earthworm Jim can get away with something like this, only with his games could the makers go “let’s just change Jim to a salamander” and still seem natural.
Of course, new levels were expected, so there are more changes. This time around, Jim has more guns, instead of just the one. He has a HOMEing missile (hopefully you’ll get the pun when you play) a three-finger shot (which is as awesome as it sounds), a bubble gun (which is as lame as it sounds) and a kill all shot called the barn blaster. Not only can Jim find new guns, but he can also find new power-ups which will give him extra continues or 200% health. Another change that was the addition of Snott. Basically, you’ll have to send Snott out of your backpack to swing off a ceiling or you can use him as a parachute to slow your descent. The problem is that Jim already had these abilities in the last game, so that change was just superficial.
In the last review, I didn’t talk about the graphics or the music and just grazed the sounds. This game pretty much matches most of those aspects, so consider this a make good. Seeing how ridiculous and cartoony the concept and characters already were, they decided to make that the look of the series. This is fitting, but doesn’t always work: some things will need to be more detailed and therefore clash, while others won’t have enough detail and look flat. The sound effects are pretty good in both games and haven’t changed much. It is however likely that you become annoyed by Jim’s repeated shouts of “tender” or “groovy”. But where both games really shine are their soundtracks, and honestly, I think EWJ2 has a better one, using a couple of classical tracks to round things out (noticeably, Funiculy Funicula, as used in the Puppy Love stages and the background music to this review). The original tracks are also great, but it’s just the juxtaposition of something so classical put in something so wacky has to be mentioned.
If it sounds like I’m disappointed with Earthworm Jim 2, it’s probably because I already talked about the first Earthworm Jim and, since nothing much else has changed, the tiny changes they did make are all I have to talk about, pretty much forcing me to nit-pick. Still, this is Earthworm Jim’s grand return and it was less then what I’d hoped for: it feels a little all over the place and the story seems dull this time around. All the good points come from the last game though: this is still a really solid platform game, it’s funny, the levels are fun, etc… To sum this up, if you liked Earthworm Jim, then you should still enjoy Earthworm Jim 2. Sadly, this would be the last game Jim’s original creators, Shiny Entertainment, would work on, which sucks, because I would have liked to see where they were going. I would probably give the first Earthworm Jim about a 9, so I’ll give Earthworm Jim 2 for the Sega Genesis 8 levels out of 10.
(Now I’ll have to track down Earthworm Jim 3D for next year…)
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