Tornado Outbreak for the Wii
Previous days' entries can be read HERE.
Previous days' entries can be read HERE.
I’m fairly sure what you’re about to read is a bit of a one off, as this is a review of Tornado Outbreak that at no point will compare or make reference to a certain other game series whose name rhymes with Datarmari Kamacy.
This isn’t a self defined challenge or anything like that, it’s just that, for some reason not even known to me, I haven’t played ‘that’ game, or any of its successors. I plan to, I literally just stopped typing to put a ‘watch’ on a couple of examples on eBay, but at this point in time I know nothing more about ‘that’ series than the general concept.
Anyway…
Video game stories are often, usually justifiably, criticised for having a story that happens in the intervals between levels, rather than occurring holistically as part of the gameplay. Some of the most popular videogames ever made suffer from this, not least everything ever made by Naughty Dog.
Tornado Outbreak is one of the most jarring examples of this I’ve ever experienced. There’s a kind of pre-credits sequence that takes you through the mechanics of the game by having your tear up a dinosaur theme park. There’s a mentor character and a player character who seem to be some kind of wind-sprites, and if the game left it at that you’d assume they just enjoy whipping themselves up into a Tornado and smashing the hell out of stuff.
And then there’s a cartoon style intro sequence that explains the plot...
The player character, Zephyr, is part of a race of beings who patrol the cosmos making inhabitable planets habitable. You find some super being who’s lost some orbs on Earth and decide to help him out. However, there’s this other race of beings called Fire Fliers who are trying to stop you/him/everyone for some reason.
There are points where the story kind of links into the gameplay pretty well; you have to collect Fire Fliers to power a machine that generates cloud cover, for example, but generally speaking, when you’re playing Tornado Outbreak - shredding up trailer parks and hurling fat horses into the sun - it’s patently obvious that, when it was first conceived and designed, this was a game about causing as much destruction as possible for the sheer hell of it.
I can kind of understand the need for a distancing story, 100 people were killed by tornadoes last year alone, and hundreds more had their lives completely ruined, but as well presented and perfectly voice acted as the story is, it’s tied to the gameplay by the thinnest of threads.
Starting as a little dust devil, you twirl through a series of cartoony, themed, environments, sucking up increasingly larger items and objects. You might start with traffic cones or flowers, for example, and when you’ve gathered up enough of those you increase in size. At this point, fences will splinter before you and smaller animals like chickens and seagulls will get hoovered up. And so it continues and you’re a full blown super-vortex smashing through multi storey buildings as if they were made of matchsticks.
To add challenge and direction you have to collect fifty of the aforementioned ‘Fire Fliers’ from each level within a given time limit. Furthermore, as you find and collect them, they will replenish the count down - with extra agency given through a combo system that involves chaining together collections to ‘bank’ as many as possible at once, with the caveat that holding on to them slows you down.
It’s pretty basic stuff, but it becomes increasingly compelling and challenging as the game goes on. There are boss battles to mix things up but they’re all fairly identical. The most interesting part of them is actually in the navigation of patches of sunlight to reach the battle points.
Zephyr is allergic to UV so has to stay out of the sun. This is used to define level limits in the bulk of the game, but in these short pre-boss sequences you have to find a path through patches of moving cloud cover in a manner that puts me in mind of Frogger.
But these are but brief intervals. Most of the game is just tearing up Farms, Army Bases, Vegas, London, etc, etc and working out the right strategy to have enough time to get the mandatory fifty (optional 100) Fire Fliers needed to complete the level - and it’s great fun.
Thanks in no small part to graphics with fantastic personality, and dramatic/thematic music that fits the bill perfectly, Tornado Outbreak is hugely enjoyable for both it’s knockabout nature and the deceptively deep balancing act of getting big enough, fast enough, and making sure there’s plenty of Fire Fliers about to make a good combo.
It’s testament to the addictiveness of the game that I tore through the majority of the (admittedly pretty short) game in just one sitting. There’s built in replayability though, and I’ll be going back to complete some collectathon side challenges at some point in the future.
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