One genre of game I’ll never tire of is the 3D platformer. It may be the nostalgia talking, but growing up with Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie, and getting modern greats like A Hat in Time and Spark the Electric Jester prove that running and jumping in three dimensions can still be a blast all these decades later. That’s why I kept Raccoo Venture on my radar, as it was from solo developer Diego Ras and had a lot of potential from its trailers and its Early Access offerings. So now that this title is out, was it worth the wait and can it hang with the greats?

Raccoo Venture adheres to the tried-and-true formula of 3D platformers – stomp on enemy heads, jump around, and solve tiny little puzzles to keep moving. It doesn’t get very complex, but it doesn’t have to in order to fit into this niche. I wish that I could state that doing the classic butt pound to dispatch enemies felt great, but it doesn’t. The hit detection is iffy at best and I ended up dispatching enemies without even landing on their head. To the game’s credit, though, I didn’t miss many jumps thanks to watching my shadow and having an adequate jump height.

On your quest to secure your family’s chess pieces in Raccoo Venture, you’re greeted with an overworld of old. Unfortunately, to progress, you’re going to have to search every nook and cranny to gather enough resources to move to new levels. This is exceptionally frustrating as some players don’t necessarily want to scour every level and look up guides just to access the rest of the game. When a collect-athon implements requirements out of a reasonable reach, the game feels more like work than it does play, and it’s a cardinal sin of the genre that most games tend to avoid.

This isn’t to say Raccoo Venture is all bad. It’s most definitely a competent title that just has shortcomings. The target audience may deviate a tad, but those who like to go out of their way to accomplish everything and are okay replaying levels several times will be right at home with it. Not every level is a copy/paste job as the variety in puzzles was nice enough to keep me invested for a few hours. If the combat was cleaned up and the requirements to progress were more lenient, this could have made for a better game than what is currently present.

It’s an admirable effort, especially for just one developer to undertake, but Raccoo Venture is not on the level of contemporaries like New Super Lucky’s Tale or Toree 3D. The draw of 3D platformers is having unbridled exploration at its forefront, but to lock off the game and make you relive the same levels and enemies en masse destroys that spirit unequivocally. There was also a year’s gap in communication before the game was released, so it’s not exactly like there’s a ton of goodwill lost in the process. I’d hope for patches to fix the problems, but after four years of development, that’s a long shot.

A PS5 review copy of Raccoo Venture was provided by QUByte Interactive for the purposes of this review.

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Raccoo Venture

$14.99

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Impressive for One Dev
• Nice Music

Cons

• Awful Combat
• Serious Progression Blockers
• Rough Checkpoints