Marsupilami 2: Salsa Palombia is the sequel to Marsupilami: Hoobadventure, a game from 2021 which I completely missed, but I do love a platformer, so wanted to check this out.
The plot tells us that a strange melody has swept across Palombia… and all the animals have suddenly started dancing, leaving chaos in their wake! The creature behind this crazy beat is none other than the Mummy Queen, back from the Land of the Dead with her minions to play a cursed concert with a calamitous crescendo.
And you have to help the Marsupilamis save Palombia from the Mummy Queen and her minions!
Okay, so what I did like with this is that you get to play as four different characters along the way, often switching betweeen at least two of them during the course of each level, as specific aspects can only be carried out with certain characters. When it all works out, and as it flies by with a glorious 60fps, it looks amazing.
However, on the downside, if there’s an annoying this about this, it’s that it’s BLOODY HARD!
Marsupilami 2: Salsa Palombia is fun, but when it comes to collecting the five big musical notes, I much prefer the levels where those are NOT hidden out of sight and easily missable, as then I have to redo the level. Grrr…
As such, this game errs on the side of being maddenly frustrating, and so I’m running two saved games at the same time, so I’ll try the level once in one, and then try it again in the second – usually doing better in the latter. But can I find everything I need? Not always…
Now, as I said, I love a platformer, but when I get to a level and try it multiple times, yet can’t get ALL of the key aspects – level 5 in world 1 giving me the five musical notes but NOT the bonus target with the additional challenge, it does serve to irritate. Hence, I speedran the other levels and had a go at the challenges, but I’m going to temporarily call it a day here, as gaming’s meant to be fun, and this is more ‘irritate’ than fun.
Some people will love these impossible platformers, but it is not for me. I could go through and try to Speedrun them, but as you progress through each world, some levels need you to unlock them with the amount of apples you’ve caught – which you won’t have enough of if you’ve zoomed past them all! So, that’s not the answer.
I also don’t understand that if I have to collect 99 musical notes, and out of the 10 levels in each world, I’ve got all the main ones, where are the ones I’ve seemingly missed, as it’s not counting them?
In the gameplay videos, for any levels where I state “100%”, it’s because I’ve collected all the big musical notes and the bonus target. Every now and again, I’ll miss a single apple, but then that’s impossible to avoid when you run past a checkpoint, which is basically ‘locked door syndrome’ as you can’t go back and get them. That is also a pain. I know other games do it, but I wish none of them would.
Marsupilami 2: Salsa Palombia is released September 3rd on PC/Steam, plus PS5 and Nintendo Switch. A demo is available. At least that’s free. I wouldn’t buy this. If they don’t care, why should you?
Important info:
- Developer: Microids
- Publisher: Microids
- Players: Single-player
PC specs:
- CPU: AMD RYZEN 9 7950X3D
- Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E CARBON WIFI AMD X670 S AM5 DDR5 PCIe 5.0 4x M.2 2.5GbE AMD EXPO™ ATX
- RAM: 64GB (2x32GB) Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RGB PC5-44800 (5600Mhz)
- Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ 24GB GDDR6 Ray-Tracing RDNA3 6144 Streams
- 1st Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 (2280) PCIe 4.0 (x4) NVMe SSD TLC V-NAND 7450MB/s Read 6900MB/s
- 2nd Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5” SSD SATA III 6Gb/s MJX MLC V-NAND 2GB Cache Read 560MB/s Write 530MB/s 98k/88k IOPS
- 3rd Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5” SSD SATA III 6Gb/s MJX MLC V-NAND 2GB Cache Read 560MB/s Write 530MB/s 98k/88k IOPS
- 4th Storage Drive: Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB NAS 3.5″ SATA HDD/Hard Drive
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.