The biggest frustration is that these choices actually diminish the impact of the solid features of Tembo the Badass Elephant, which are appealing to fans of classic titles like Crash Bandicoot and Sonic.
The biggest problem is the fact that the developer wants players to get through levels multiple times in order to get more lives and to hunt down enemies, a decision that modern gamers will certainly criticize.
TEMBO THE BADASS ELEPHANT FULL
Tembo the Badass Elephant has a set of interesting ideas and manages to create a cool contrast between the protagonist and the feats that he manages to accomplish, but the full potential of the title is never realized by the team at Game Freak. I suspect that there will be plenty of gamers who will stop here, unwilling to get through the same area to make progress. Once I finished the first three levels, I understood that I was now asked to go back and farm them in order to move forward in the game, something I found hard to accept. “I loved running through the levels of Tembo the Badass Elephant at first, but only because I did not pay attention to the fact that I was under pressure to kill Phantom grunts and get hostages free. The character himself also needs to get peanuts to get more lives, and once he loses all of them, a level needs to be restarted from the first checkpoint. The game does not have too many stages and that means the development team has found a way to basically gate progress and make sure that gamers cannot reach the later levels unless they manage to achieve clearly designed goals.īoth enemies killed and the number of civilians saved are being counted in Tembo the Badass Elephant and missions cannot be accessed until a threshold is reached.
The levels themselves are also well designed, with some variety in the paths that the gamer can take and some impressive aerial sequences. The design of the various enemies is varied and the mini-bosses and Phantom leaders are often tough to defeat, which offers a solid level of challenge for Tembo, even if the focus is on movement and exploration rather than on combat. The aim is to take out enemies, destroy their vehicles, take out their powerful bosses, and generally cause havoc, while also getting civilians to safety and gathering peanuts that will allow the elephant to increase the amount of lives he has. The core mechanics are relatively simple, but they can be combined in a variety of ways to move across the levels, and the feeling of speed is great, especially given how big the main character is. Once the action starts, Tembo the Badass Elephant manages to offer some very enjoyable core mechanics, allowing players to jump, float, dash, spin and use water to extinguish flames as they progress through the level. It's silly, but there's no malice in the storytelling and the bright visuals mix well with the narrative, creating an alternate reality that supports the action well without getting in its way, even if the actual events depicted are pretty dark. Tembo the Badass Elephant takes place in a world where an elephant can be trained for war and then called into service when his country comes under attack, the only hope his nation has to stop the invaders.
TEMBO THE BADASS ELEPHANT SERIES
The title is important because it represents a first foray outside of the Pokemon comfort zone for Game Freak, the company best known for working with Nintendo on the series that made Pikachu and his friends famous.
Tembo the Badass Elephant is a side scrolling 2D platformer title which takes some of the core elements of the genre and implements them in new ways, offering gamers a chance to control a protagonist that is comically unsuited to fast and precise movement and then creating an interesting set of mechanics around his very limitations.