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.

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.