27 years after its launch, Earthworm Jim 3D is unfortunately still awful

Sometimes, games come into your life at the wrong time. Maybe you are too young, too old, too busy, too preoccupied to appreciate them for what they are. Those are the games worth giving another try a few years or even decades down the line to see if your experience has changed. And then there’s Earthworm Jim 3D. Like many ill-fated attempts at taking a 2D platformer classic and moving it into the third dimension, Earthworm Jim 3D suffers from the classic issues of its ilk: an actively hostile camera and a control scheme that didn’t seem to have followed the character into the new plane of existence.https://embeds.beehiiv.com/a8d62108-86ed-4039-bf49-44877ba62c15 The catch, if there is one, I suppose, is that I never played the 2D originals, so my childhood experience and memories of the merry little worm and his crazy adventures are tied exclusively to this menace of a game. And as I’ve documented on Destructoid before, I occasionally go back to one of my old haunts, if only to wrap up a game I never quite finished back in the day. Sometimes, I realize I was just bad at the stuff as a kid. At other times, times like these, filled with worms and brain mass and golden udders and an absolutely awful camera, I realize that, no, it was the game that sucked, not me. There’s some good psychedelic stuff to be enjoyed in the game. Our titular worm hero is befallen by a flying-cow-related accident and is therefore stuck in his own mind for the whole game, trying to wake up from a coma and battling weird vistas in various parts of his brain. Memory, Happiness, Fear, and Fantasy are the four… I suppose I can’t quite call them hemispheres, can I? Anyway, each has two levels and a boss fight. You need to collect marbles and golden udders as you go on progressively stupider adventures, from rescuing huge blue boxer briefs to helping a cucumber king escape from a personalized prison. Many refrigerators are involved along the way. It would be a very silly game and quite fun in the sort of “what the hell were they thinking” and “how much paint did they need to huff to come up with this” sort of way, which I assume was a large part of the enjoyment in the original two games as well. Unfortunately, neither the controls nor the camera wants you to have a good time, and their combined malice is genuinely debilitating. https://www.youtube.com/embed/qg6h41cuA34?start=1721&feature=oembed One-eighth camera turns are the best you’ve got to work with, with such an extremely narrow field of view and poorly selected angles that you simply cannot keep the action in your focus, and the similarly tanky nature of the controls (at least on PC, because, you know, late-nineties ports) coupled with fairly precise platforming puzzles and frantic multi-enemy combat makes the experience nigh unbearable no matter how much goodwill you’re bringing to it all. And even Mahatma Gandhi would have had an aneurysm after the third goddamn pig-surfing boss fight. (And you try taking a screenshot of this game in widescreen to add to your article. Seriously, I dare you.) Not everything can survive in the third dimension. Spoilers, I suppose: our intrepid hero does wake up from the coma, only to be immediately put down by a cow once again falling on him after all the travails. Talk about a kick in the worm balls. Had I managed to finish the game as a kid, I’m sure I would have been pissed. Now, as an adult, who didn’t even want to try, I see it as an appropriate death knell for a franchise that surely deserved better. 0 The post 27 years after its launch, Earthworm Jim 3D is unfortunately still awful appeared first on Destructoid.

Jun 20, 2026 - 04:47

27 years after its launch, Earthworm Jim 3D is unfortunately still awful

Sometimes, games come into your life at the wrong time. Maybe you are too young, too old, too busy, too preoccupied to appreciate them for what they are. Those are the games worth giving another try a few years or even decades down the line to see if your experience has changed.

And then there’s Earthworm Jim 3D.

Like many ill-fated attempts at taking a 2D platformer classic and moving it into the third dimension, Earthworm Jim 3D suffers from the classic issues of its ilk: an actively hostile camera and a control scheme that didn’t seem to have followed the character into the new plane of existence.

https://embeds.beehiiv.com/a8d62108-86ed-4039-bf49-44877ba62c15 The catch, if there is one, I suppose, is that I never played the 2D originals, so my childhood experience and memories of the merry little worm and his crazy adventures are tied exclusively to this menace of a game. And as I’ve documented on Destructoid before, I occasionally go back to one of my old haunts, if only to wrap up a game I never quite finished back in the day. Sometimes, I realize I was just bad at the stuff as a kid. At other times, times like these, filled with worms and brain mass and golden udders and an absolutely awful camera, I realize that, no, it was the game that sucked, not me.

There’s some good psychedelic stuff to be enjoyed in the game. Our titular worm hero is befallen by a flying-cow-related accident and is therefore stuck in his own mind for the whole game, trying to wake up from a coma and battling weird vistas in various parts of his brain. Memory, Happiness, Fear, and Fantasy are the four… I suppose I can’t quite call them hemispheres, can I? Anyway, each has two levels and a boss fight. You need to collect marbles and golden udders as you go on progressively stupider adventures, from rescuing huge blue boxer briefs to helping a cucumber king escape from a personalized prison. Many refrigerators are involved along the way.

It would be a very silly game and quite fun in the sort of “what the hell were they thinking” and “how much paint did they need to huff to come up with this” sort of way, which I assume was a large part of the enjoyment in the original two games as well. Unfortunately, neither the controls nor the camera wants you to have a good time, and their combined malice is genuinely debilitating.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qg6h41cuA34?start=1721&feature=oembed One-eighth camera turns are the best you’ve got to work with, with such an extremely narrow field of view and poorly selected angles that you simply cannot keep the action in your focus, and the similarly tanky nature of the controls (at least on PC, because, you know, late-nineties ports) coupled with fairly precise platforming puzzles and frantic multi-enemy combat makes the experience nigh unbearable no matter how much goodwill you’re bringing to it all. And even Mahatma Gandhi would have had an aneurysm after the third goddamn pig-surfing boss fight.

(And you try taking a screenshot of this game in widescreen to add to your article. Seriously, I dare you.)

Not everything can survive in the third dimension. Spoilers, I suppose: our intrepid hero does wake up from the coma, only to be immediately put down by a cow once again falling on him after all the travails. Talk about a kick in the worm balls. Had I managed to finish the game as a kid, I’m sure I would have been pissed. Now, as an adult, who didn’t even want to try, I see it as an appropriate death knell for a franchise that surely deserved better.

0 The post 27 years after its launch, Earthworm Jim 3D is unfortunately still awful appeared first on Destructoid.

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