Earthworm Jim is known mainly for his two mediocre 2D platformers on the Mega Drive/SNES. These were both elevated due to their style and sense of humour, with lots of new stuff happening all the time. A completely new team handled his jump to 3D and brought about their own take on the franchise.

In Earthworm Jim 3D, the titular Jim is in a coma, so you play as a representation of himself within his own mind, trying to find his marbles and save himself. You’d expect all sorts of crazy stuff happening inside his mind.

Instead, we have a collection of uninspired levels: a few barns, a haunted house, a graveyard, an alien ship, and a beige death valley. The only one of any note is a level made from food, with lava baked beans – although even then, it’s not clear what most aspects of the level are supposed to be.

This goes on in the level design too, with immensely bland levels that are both large and empty. There’s nothing fun to see. The levels are linear and the objectives are straight forward, with having to occasionally backtrack across areas now devoid of enemies.

The platforming is equally tedious. Earthworm Jim is extremely slow, making the large, empty spaces take forever to get across. The jumping is extremely imprecise (and his hover move doesn’t even last a second) and it’s extremely difficult to judge where you are in relation to other objects. The terrible and unresponsive camera doesn’t help, either.

The only decent point of the gameplay is that there are some interesting weapons you can use.

The boss fights are especially bad. In these (they’re all the same), you race around on a pig that’s an absolute nightmare to control. Both you and your opponents are collecting marbles, and hitting your opponent will make them lose five of theirs (with the same happening to you when you get hit). The controls make it extremely frustrating to collect anything, let alone avoid the barrage of rockets fired at you. Even the final boss is the same thing.

Earthworm Jim 3D is a deeply unimaginative platformer that gets the controls and camera wrong, and brings nothing new to the table to try and make up with it. The incredibly annoying sound clips from Dan Castellaneta (half of them are just his Homer voice) certainly don’t help matters, either.

Worst

It’s just sloppy, really. Also, death happens far more frequently than it should, due mainly to the unhelpful camera, and some random jumping. Pressing A makes you jump, and tapping A again will cause Jim to glide for a short while, courtesy of his helicopter-spin head. Unfortunately, this double-tap actin doesn’t always work, which isn’t too great when you need to get to the other side of a deadly sea of baked beans.

Jes Bickham, N64 Magazine #35. Review Score: 68%

Remake or remaster?

If they’re going to throw together a collection of Earthworm Jim games, then sure, but there’s nothing really worth playing here.

Official ways to get the game.

A buggy, glitchy PC port is available on GoG and Steam.