Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return Special Edition brings pink-haired caveboy energy to the modern generation

Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return Special Edition gives players a chance to time-travel back 25 years and play one of the most visually memorable platformers of the generation.

For those of us lucky enough to grow up in the age of brightly-coloured console mascots, the original Tomba! had at least as much mascot energy that the biggest platforming heroes gave out. The plucky, teeth-gnashing wild child was instantly memorable due to their distinctive pink hair, and even when they were fully ability-strapped by the end of the first game (released as Tombi! in Europe because of, well, Italians) they were still just as recognisable. Tomba 2: The Evil Swine Return attempted to turn that character into a franchise, however its release during such a strange time for technology sent it in an odd direction.

The original Tomba! wasn’t just visually charming, it was also a shotgun-blast attempt at innovating platformers during the late 90s revival. It featured an event system, similar to RPG quests, Tomba’s initial attack involved a downward grapple and throw which played into puzzle, and the developer — Whoopee Camp — willingly messed with perspective, with some town areas featuring isometric views and Tomba having an ability to jump between map layers. These innovations, along with others that I’ve not mentioned, made for a potent mix that really resonated with those who played it. However, with Tomba! 2 they kept innovating…

With Tomba! 2, it wasn’t just leaping into the background or foreground, it was shifting the 2D platforming on an axis. The isometric viewpoint also reared its head a few more times. In many ways, it felt like the developers wanted to make a 3D metroidvania, but they knew that floating cameras often take away the direction of a 2D-platforming world. In many ways this was the right decision, but the feeling of platforming was lost in favour of the feeling of exploring 3D-cube spaces through axis shifts. If Tomba! was divisive, Tomba! 2 would surely further divide up the divided.

But, gameplay, taste and charm aside, this article is about Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return Special Edition. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Limited Run for pulling together Carbon Engine and getting slightly obscure games modernised where previous publishers, IP Holders and Distributors wouldn’t. The Carbon Engine also slaps some nice emulator Mod-cons onto the releases such as save states and rewinds. However, this special edition’s development did feel a little bit slap-dash.

It launched with issues that were added in during this process — awkward cross-region music hijinks, a botched take on the ‘import data from first game’ feature (in which it essentially granted 100% legacy content well ahead of when it would be accessible in natural play) and a stumble on the death screen. These are all fixed now, but it does mark the first time I’ve seen mishandling like this from Limited Run and does rekindle the ever-burning ‘Remaster, Remake or Emulate?’ debate.

Even with that fixed, some of the sound quality shifts around bizarrely, and the frame-rate drops when the screen gets a bit busy due to how physics systems used to work. These are somewhat forgivable for an emulator, and for people who are buying Tomba! 2 for nostalgia reasons, or have picked it up now that the CE issues have been fixed, this probably won’t matter. Part of me just wishes that this was a ‘rebuild’ that had the level of care that Lizardcube and Jankenteam showed when they modernised games like Wonderboy and Alex Kidd.

All of this aside. Tomba! 2 is a magnificent game, it was one of those things that could only have happened at that moment in time, things like the event system and perspective shifting truly feel like a timeline divergence point where games could have gone a completely different way. It captures the feeling of lighthearted joy that brightly coloured platformers of the era had, while also doing clever, new things in a world that you really want to see more and more of.

Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return Special Edition is available now on Steam