The Good
Putt-Putt Travels Through Time was a real standout title that really showed what Humongous Entertainment was capable of doing with the character now that they'd fully matured as a company. With its more ambitious ideas and a superior execution, the game ended up being a major improvement over its predecessors. Of course, this also meant that following up on it was always going to be a tall order. But instead of trying to one-up it, Humongous chose to take its sequel in a rather different direction.
In fact, this isn't really a conventional sequel at all. While it's technically a new adventure set after Putt-Putt's previous games, it intentionally goes through a lot of the same motions as Putt-Putt Joins the Parade in a way you'd normally only see in a remake.
And I'm fine with that. While I have no love for Putt-Putt's first game, even I can't deny that it had some interesting ideas that set it apart from the rest of them. But by 1998, even Humongous themselves (or at least their publishers) seems to have come to the conclusion that their games from the DOS era were just too outdated to continue selling, with them hardly seeing any rereleases anymore. So perhaps a sequel that doubles as a remake was the right choice to bring that game's ideas to a new audience, while also providing an opportunity to execute them far better than before.
The main thing that sets this game apart from most other Junior Adventures (with the obvious exception of Parade) is the setting. Instead of exploring new worlds, Putt-Putt spends the entire game in his familiar home of Cartown. One part of the town's layout is directly copied from Parade, though the rest is very different. By the year 1998, Humongous understood that having a large portion of the town just consist of three streets that exist almost solely to grind for money by engaging in boring chores is not a very smart way to design a game, so they replaced that with proper locations. And even old areas and characters typically have new and more interesting purposes. For instance, Chuck was a very minor character in Parade whose existence a lot of players probably weren't even aware of, as he only showed up for a moment to help Putt-Putt if he foolishly blew his tires driving over nails. This time, in an amusing reversal of his original role, he's the one who blew a tire and needs to be helped as part of one of the puzzle chains.
The puzzle quality is decent this time. There's definitely more substance and creativity to them than in Putt-Putt's early games. That said, I still think Putt-Putt Travels Through Time had more memorable puzzles overall. That game's more varied setting simply gave the designers room for a level creativity beyond what this setting can offer.
The presentation is certainly a huge improvement over Parade and still pretty solid by Humongous' current standards. Even old environments look far better than they used to. Some old characters have been redesigned, but for the better.
As far as the music goes, I'd be lying if I said it was on par with the soundtracks from Putt-Putt's last two adventures. Though to be fair to Tom McGurk, it's not exactly easy to compete with both George Sanger and Jeremy Soule at the same time. He still managed to produce some pleasant tunes. There's a clear country music influence that gives the game a relaxed, rural atmosphere that fits it rather well. Due to the much more uniform setting, there aren't any drastic shifts in tone or genre between the tracks, but there are still plenty of location-specific ones that help make those places more memorable. As with most Junior Adventures he worked on as a composer, there's a location that can play various secondary vocal themes, but the ones here are pretty dull and uninspired. Thankfully, the main vocal themes fare much better.
The Bad
The voice acting is largely fine. One thing that's easy to notice this time however is that Putt-Putt has been recast. Until now, he was always voiced by Jason Ellefson. And while Ellefson had a bit of a rough start, once he got the hang of it, his authentically childlike voice really helped bring the character to life. But by the time Putt-Putt Travels Through Time was made, it was starting to become clear that he was getting too old for the role, so replacing him was a necessary move at this point. Nancy Cartwright tries her best to imitate his old voice and actually manages to get reasonably close, but it's not quite there. If Putt-Putt had always sounded like this, I'd probably consider it a surprisingly decent imitation of a boy's voice. But when it has to compete with an actual boy's voice, it still comes off as slightly artificial. Apparently, Humongous had a lot of different women try to reproduce Ellefson's voice and picked Cartwright because she came the closest. I can indeed believe that. But what I don't understand is why they never thought of hiring a new child voice actor instead.
When it comes to randomization, the game fares a lot better than Parade, which only changed in fairly insignificant ways between playthroughs. But it doesn't quite meet the standards the Junior Adventures had reached by this point, and it's certainly a major downgrade compared to Putt-Putt Travels Through Time. In typical Junior Adventure fashion, there are four items you need to obtain to complete the game. Three of them are locked behind one of two randomly picked puzzle chains. There are two puzzle chains that can't occur in the same playthrough due to them giving the same characters contradicting roles, but unlike Pajama Sam 2, the game will permit any other combination. One of the puzzle chains also has a step that's randomized a bit further between various different options and helps increase the replay value. However, what really drags this aspect of the game down is that the last item is always locked behind the same puzzle chain, with there being very little randomization to it. As a result, you always obtain it in essentially the same way each time, which is something that Humongous had mostly grown out of by now.
And while the quality of most of the individual puzzle chains is fine, as I mentioned earlier, there is one that can hardly be considered very memorable, as it simply hands you its item as a reward for briefly playing a boring minigame that isn't even exclusive to it.
Speaking of which, minigames are probably even more of a focus here than in earlier Putt-Putt games. They're superior to those found in Parade, but still far from Humongous' best. The Pachinko game makes for a cute little distraction, while a few others are unremarkable, but at least get the job done. But there are some rather weak ones as well. Harvesting fruit and vegetables in particular is largely just a boring, drawn out chore, yet the game expects you to do it for multiple purposes. A lot of the minigames are integrated pretty well into the puzzle chains, but considering they're not very fun, I can't really say they improve their quality by a whole lot.
On a side note, when it comes to changing Putt-Putt's color, this game is both an improvement, yet also a downgrade compared to its predecessor. It's nice that it now also adjusts the color of the dashboard, as it always seemed a bit weird to me how it stayed purple all the time. Yet the selection of colors has inexplicably shrunk back to the original seven. The different brightness levels from Putt-Putt Travels Through Time are nowhere to be found. And they're not going to come back either.
The Bottom Line
I appreciate Humongous Entertainment trying to do something different with Putt-Putt this time in order to give this game its own identity. But while it makes for a nice change of pace with its mundane, yet comfortable setting, the overall execution just isn't as strong as last time. The rather lackluster quality of the minigames is a notable flaw in a Putt-Putt game, since they're a fairly major component of this subseries of the Junior Adventures. And while the other aspects are handled better, none of them are really strong enough to make the game stick out.
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