Trombone Champ
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Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Critic Reviews for Trombone Champ
Trombone Champ may suffer from the joy-con curse, but it's still a laugh out loud good time with a surprising amount of secrets to find. You're not supposed to be good at Trombone Champ, but playing with friends will make you feel like a master tromboner.
Real-world trombone playing entails years or decades of study, intense practice, sacrifice, blood, perspiration and tears. With Trombone Champ you can bypass all that sweat equity and just ascend to the trombone throne. Trombone Champ is a humble game made by folks with a genuine love of music, hot dogs, baboons and, even more remarkably, the trombone. It’s fun, funny, a little weird and an actual, genuine game despite what sounds like a silly premise. It’s no surprise that everyone secretly wants to be a trombone player, and now anyone can rise to that only dreamed-of level of coolness. Grab yourself some hot dogs, hug a baboon and go play Trombone Champ.
Trombone Champ is a game about perfection. Before you play, it asks you to select a stance for your tromboner: 'estudious' or 'jubilant'. Neither of these is appropriate when you know your performance will be as ear-abusive as an excited puppy mauling a bulb horn. Or are they? The true lesson is perhaps to hold your head high anyway. In life, as in Trombone Champ, faced as we all are with certain doom, be estudious if you like, be jubilant, parp like crazy, and be your very best you – no matter how imperfect that invariably is.
Trombone Champ is a goofy, chaotic music sim that never for a moment takes itself seriously. Everything from the gameplay to the song selection to the loading screens is meant to amuse, making it a perfect fit for the Switch. The fun can wear off quickly when playing solo, but it's consistently entertaining for a full band (up to a quartet, anyway).
Though slightly held back by its visual presentation and potentially polarising humour, Trombone Champ is a respectable rhythm game with enjoyable gameplay that fans of the genre are bound to enjoy.
As perhaps the most ridiculous rhythm game I've ever played, Trombone Champ presents a surprisingly satisfying level of challenge.
Even if the gameplay loop outstays its welcome after a few rounds, and you can play all of its songs in about two hours, I can’t help but love the fact that Trombone Champ exists. It’s just… weird. Weird in the most adorable of ways.
I may have only spent 6ish hours with Trombone Champ’s main game, but those few hours were spent giggling and guffawing at how silly my mistakes sounded. Given enough time, my mistakes were few and far between, and I truly did become the ultimate Trombone Champ of yore. Trombone Champ may present itself as a novelty title — a joke not meant to be taken seriously — but those who give it a chance will find a surprising amount of polish and sophistication. I never could have predicted that Trombone Champ would become my favorite rhythm/music game of 2022, and if you’re even remotely interested in the title, I’m confident it will be yours too.
