Monday 3 August 2015

Tembo the Badass Elephant

   Remember when I said I was going to talk about a further 3 games, well forget that. Yeah I played them but there's not really much to say about them, except that you should've bought 'Saviors' when it was 15p on Steam. I moved on to this game then, after all it is a Sega published 2D plaformer based around speed and you know my feelings on those.
   It's not like Sonic. Despite the gag I made just there and what lots of reviewers are saying. Just because it's published by Sega and about a fast animal doesn't automatically make it the same (can't think of a good analogy). They don't play anything alike. There's plenty of 2D platformers in the world and people just don't say they're all the same. This lazy comparison has annoyed me (clearly) as a massive Sonic fan (from the Mega drive days anyway), granted, it does welcome this comparison for the reasons listed above if you hadn't played this game, but if you have, you'd know there is no comparison to make.
   Hmm, that dragged on a bit. Anyway, getting to the actual game. It starts out great, speeding through the first area of levels, trashing enemies in well designed worlds and having a whale of a time, until you get to the fourth level where you have to have hit a certain amount of enemy kills to progress. Urgh. Then that happens on the fourth level of every wold so you have to keep going back to older levels and making sure you kill off as many enemies as possible to advance. Speaking of replaying levels, the fact that the game lets you replay levels whenever you want but doesn't give you infinite lives is stupid, and I'll tell you why. On level 1, you can easily pick up enough peanuts (you see, peanuts are the thing you pick up in this game to build up extra lives) to gain 2 extra lives every playthrough. That means you can just play level 1 as many times as you need to have enough lives to complete the game, all it does is waste the players time as I had to keep playing level 1 to have enough lives to get past the final boss.



   Speaking of final bosses, and I've spoken enough before about my dislike of bosses as a whole and how I think it's time to move on from them, but my point here is that just like Rogue Legacy a few weeks before it's got a double layered boss, where the first bit is pretty easy but you have to spend ages doing that first section of that boss over and over before you can get to the actual tough bit that you need to get done. Another waste of my time that I'll never get back and could have spent doing something more important like, watching TV or drinking.
   Going back to what I was saying before, the problem is the game kind of changes about 2/3 of the way through, where it becomes more fiddly and the speed element goes from the game so what the initial section of the game did so well vanishes and it becomes something else. It's still not bad though, I should point out, it's just a completely different game. While I'm talking about things that aren't so great about it, it's the start up time. When you fire up the game, it takes forever to load (on xbox one anyway).
   Sill though, it is a pretty well designed platformer, it's worth a play if you like classic 2D platformers, but for a non-fan it won't convert you. It's fine, but I won't remember it in a years time. Decent game, stupid name.

 
 

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