Limited Run Games’ port of the cult classic Tomba! (or Tombi! in Europe) is out — in fact, it’s been out a while now, having launched on 1st August — and if you’ve been looking forward to this one you’re probably wondering where our review of this Special Edition release has gotten to.
We’ve seen reports online of issues with the 1997 PlayStation platformer ranging from major to minor across all platforms, and the devs have stated that there’s a patch in the works to address known issues. The thing is, we’ve run into a serious issue that renders Tomba essentially unplayable on Nintendo’s console — or one of us has.
The game has been repeatedly crashing on reviewer Mitch Vogel’s Switch, requiring a hold-down-the-Power-button hard reset every time. These hard locks occur as frequently as 30 seconds into the game, although he managed to play for 15 minutes once. A significant impediment to forming a worthwhile impression, we’re sure you’d agree. However, our video team has also been playing it and hasn’t run into this issue at all so far. No hard locks, no problems whatsoever. Both are running the latest available version of the game (version 1.0.0).
We’ve contacted Limited Run to find out more and get an update on when a patch might roll out (remember, Limited Run is taking pre-orders right now for a physical edition shipping later this year) but haven’t heard back yet. As things stand, though, we’ve got one person who’s been having a good time with it and another who’s been unable to play anything, besides the extra interview and gallery content. Which is pleasant, but it ain’t the game.
While it’s clear that you should not buy the Switch version of Tomba at the time of writing — unless you enjoy the thrill of dropping $20 on a game and not knowing if it’ll be playable or not, that is — we wanted to get a better sense of how widespread this issue with the Switch version is. Let us know in the poll below if you’ve encountered any problems.
We’ll have our review of Tomba with you…, well, as soon as we’re able to play the thing for more than a few minutes at a time. Zion’s enjoyed what he’s played so far; for Mitch, chance would be a fine thing. Let us know how you’ve been getting on.