Tomb Rumble is a 2D Collectathon Platformer with the twist of being a competitive multiplayer game. As the name suggests, the game was heavily inspired by the Tomb Raider games and the Indiana Jones movies.
Tomb Rumble is a MMO, which means that all players enter the chosen level in real time. Players need to walk and jump through the levels, passing the deadly obstacles and collect golden Coins or more valuable treasures in the form of Sapphires. Every Level has a tight timelimit of 45 seconds to reach a rope at the end of the level, which helps the players to escape. Multiple levels are being played in a row and the aim is to be the player with the most loot. Every couple of levels you will return to a HUB area via a helicopter, where you trade your collected coins for cosmetics. After some stages you will also get a special combat level, where players don't have to collect to loot, but fight each other and the surviving players gets the most coins as a reward.
Overall there are hundreds of levels in the game, which provides a high level of variety (you can even create your own levels and share them with other players). There can be lavapits, ancient temple ruins, frozen places or dense jungle environments for example. The only common element are the deathtraps in every level, which ensure that you have to pay attention to the platforming, because one ill timed jump leads to your characters demise in that level. Defeated characters however are not gone for good and respawn as different enemy types, which can still collect coins, push other players into the pits and even finish the level via the rope (Players start as mummies and can unlock a variety of other enemies, like monkeys, werewolves, ghosts and so on). Living players btw can also push their opponents into pits and set up additional deadly traps behind them, which can provide some good entertainment.
The controls of Tomb Rumble are very simple. You can walk with WASD or the arrow keys and the W/Up key perform jumps and the S/Down key lays traps on the ground or pushes players. Despite its simplicity the controls work fine. The pixel art style also fits the game well and looks much better than in some other games.
There are however also a couple of annoying aspects about the game. The tutorial of the game for example explains the basics quite well, but unfortunately you get forced to play it every time you launch the game. There are sometimes popup messages appearing towards the end of a level asking you to rate the map. These however can only be closed with the mouse. Those are unnecessary annoyances.
Tomb Rumble's biggest flaw however is the very small screen size of the game. You can not play the game in fullscreen mode and the game is usually only taking around 40 % of the screen size, which is really small. Smaller objects in the levels are therefore more difficult to spot and when you have many players in a level, it can become very difficult to orientate yourself. They should have definitely handled that better. The playerbase has nowadays (February 2022) been shrinking noticeably in comparison to the release window. You rarely get more than 5-10 players in a level.
Something, that has been getting a lot of praise before the release, was the developers handling of microtransactions. They are not selling you any skins, but you instead have to trade them against the gold coins you collect ingame (so far, so good). Instead, the game is financing itself over purchasable DLC. You can buy yourself a sorcerer and a vampire DLC, which will replace the players enemy model, when he gets defeated. The catch however is, that vampires and sorcerers are more powerful than the other enemy types. They can fly through the levels and the sorcerer can for example shoot lightning bolts on other players. The Devs claim they are not more powerful than the other defeated characters, but I disagree. I believe they unfairly give advantages to defeated players, that invested real money into the game.
Pro:
- MMO Platformer
- High variety of levels
- Fast pace of the levels (no boredom/repetition)
- Cool Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones inspired Theme
- Easy Level Editor
- Simple, but functional controls
Contra:
- Small screen size
- Game can become disorientating Chaos sometimes
- Paid DLC seem unfair
- Forced Tutorial every start
- Shrinking playerbase
Result:
Tomb Rumble is a 2D MMO Collectathon Platformer, which makes the game pretty unique. The game lives up to its Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones theme and I appreciated the large variety of levels and quick pace of gameplay, which helped to keep things fresh. Creating your own levels is also pretty fun. The small screen size on the other hand is unfortunately a big weakness of the game and that sometimes creates an utter chaos, where you don't know what's going and whether you are still alive. The unbalanced DLC also really displeased me and the game might get problems to live up to the MMO tag, if player numbers don't improve. Tomb Rumble is certainly worth a try for 2D Platformer fans, just don't expect the same platforming quality you might see in a Singleplayer adventure.
6/10
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