Tembo the Badass Elephant Review (PC)

very good
key review info
  • Game: Tembo the Badass Elephant
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: Yes  
  • Reviewed on:
Tembo the Badass Elephant reveal

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.

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 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.

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
Tembo the Badass Elephant

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.

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.

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 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 levels themselves are also well designed, with some variety in the paths that the gamer can take and some impressive aerial sequences.

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.

Both 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 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.

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.

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 suspect that there will be plenty of gamers who will stop here, unwilling to get through the same area to make progress.

And the biggest problem is that Game Freak gates progress without offering gamers an alternative, a move that might work when designing arcades but not when creating console and PC titles in 2015.

Tembo the Badass Elephant has a very solid art style and the animations for the protagonist and the world have obviously been carefully constructed to appeal to fans of the classic platforming titles, but also to a new generation that has grown up with Cartoon Network shows.

It's a nice game to look at, especially when the action is fast and gamers know what they are doing in a level, and the soundtrack manages to support the feeling of speed while also making sure that the comedic tone is not lost among the generated carnage.


The Good

  • Platforming mechanics
  • World design

The Bad

  • Gated levels
  • Some difficulty spikes

Conclusion

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.

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.

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 new Game Freak title could have marked a revival for the side scrolling platformer genre, but instead it only shows how easy it is for developers working with it to make small mistakes that limit the appeal of otherwise great experiences.

Tembo the Badass Elephant succeeds as a game about momentum but fails to make the overall package as solid as it could be.

story 7
gameplay 8
concept 8
graphics 9
audio 9
multiplayer 0
final rating 8
Editor's review
very good
 

Tembo the Badass Elephant Images (15 Images)

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