With its charmingly kooky story, and art direction that bursts with personality, Tembo the Badass Elephant makes a great first impression. The first couple of simple, breezy levels hint at a formula that could build to something memorable and masterful by the end. Though, as you might expect from a lumbering war elephant, Tembo stumbles a bit along the way with finicky controls. This platformer retains its joyful sense of levity throughout, but its level designs never really ramp up to much more than a good time.
Right from the jump, Tembo exudes an airy, Saturday-morning-cartoon vibe. Our heroic paramilitary pachyderm drops down into each new level with a satisfying thud and a triumphant trumpeting of his trunk, signaling the start of some wanton environmental destruction. The first couple of levels have you tromping freely through walls, husks of old cars, and enemy tanks alike as if they were made of LEGOs; all this destruction is conveyed very well, with a comic book style “bada-bada-bada” wafting into the air with each step of Tembo’s charge, and destructible parts flying everywhere. The opening levels feel very cleanly designed around the controls, too. There’s a clearly identifiable rhythm, which allowed me to achieve a speed run-esque fluidity; the kind of meter Sonic games reach for, but seldom achieve. This is an elephant who knows how to make an entrance.
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Right from the jump, Tembo exudes an airy, Saturday-morning-cartoon vibe. Our heroic paramilitary pachyderm drops down into each new level with a satisfying thud and a triumphant trumpeting of his trunk, signaling the start of some wanton environmental destruction. The first couple of levels have you tromping freely through walls, husks of old cars, and enemy tanks alike as if they were made of LEGOs; all this destruction is conveyed very well, with a comic book style “bada-bada-bada” wafting into the air with each step of Tembo’s charge, and destructible parts flying everywhere. The opening levels feel very cleanly designed around the controls, too. There’s a clearly identifiable rhythm, which allowed me to achieve a speed run-esque fluidity; the kind of meter Sonic games reach for, but seldom achieve. This is an elephant who knows how to make an entrance.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...