REVIEW

Tembo the Badass Elephant Review

by Sam Foxall, July 20th, 2015

Channelling other animal mascots like Sonic and Donkey Kong, Tembo the Badass Elephant attempts to burst into the platformer pantheon by rolling, jumping and splashing his way through hordes of baddies. Is Tembo as badass as his name suggests, or is he blowing his own trumpet?

Let’s start off with the name. It is silly. I understand that Sega and Game Freak are trying to capture that pulpy, 80s action movie vibe but not only is the name a mouthful, it doesn’t really match up to Tembo in game, as he seems more like a heroic saviour than an animal badass. I know it seems stupid to even analyse the title but I feel it handicaps the game straight off, as people might give it a miss due to its stupid name. The actual reason for the name is that the titular Tembo is a former marine, who after helping out the army in some jungle conflict, has been called in to help protect Shell City from the wrath of PHANTOM.
Again, this is a platformer so you aren’t expecting a thrilling story but it does the job of setting up why you need to bulldoze through a bunch of levels across a peanut shaped island. The story is told via short comic panel openings which can actually be very funny. The sight of an elephant in a bandana, stirring a can of soup with his trunk whilst sitting in front of a campfire will raise a hearty chuckle in anyone playing. Unfortunately, besides some sight gags in the form of shop signs in level background or the occasional billboard, none of Tembo’s adventure retains the same wit as these little comic strips at the start of every zone or boss fight. This becomes a running theme through your time with Tembo in the fact there is so much potential for interesting designs both visually and gameplay wise, but it never seems to be capitalised on.

As mentioned earlier, Tembo takes a lot of inspiration from many other animal mascots from other franchises, with Sonic and Donkey Kong being the main two. Tembo’s fastest movement option is his spin slam, in which after jumping into the air, you input the dash button to send Tembo flying to the ground at great speed, covering tons of horizontal distance. The move is great for building momentum and speeding through courses, as you can go into the spin slam after you uppercut an enemy with your trunk and then continue to bounce along the ground, taking out more enemies as you go. Clever usage of the spin slam will be vital for speedrunning through Tembo but there is hardly any emphasis placed on its usage during the majority of the levels. Hardly any of them require you to chain all of Tembo’s movement options together in sequence and it seems that Game Freak are happy to fall back on traditional level designs rather than to really push the envelope, which is a shame given the potential. Tembo’s dash and overall feel as a character is incredibly similar to Rambi from Donkey Kong Country and you can tell Game Freak took a hell of a lot of ideas from the series to create Tembo. The usage of cannons to propel you to further parts of the stage, the very similar way secrets are placed and even the boss designs seems very much inspired by Nintendo, Rare and Retro’s work with the tie-wearing ape. Yoshi is also a touchstone for Tembo’s movement, having a flutter jump which seems ripped straight from the dinosaur’s own adventures. So while Tembo has the DNA of other great platformers in him, it never really comes together to create something which is all its own, feeling more something which is just constantly playing homage to other series rather than forging its own identity.

For the most part, running through levels with Tembo is great fun. There is a great focus on the destructible nature of your environment, as you charge straight through buildings, people and even vehicles in order to reach the goal. There is some clever usage of physics with certain areas having you manipulate giant bowling balls in order to demolish the PHANTOM army, as well as the use of Tembo’s trunk to platform and clear the way. Along with it extending to help you swing off certain obstacles, Tembo can spray water at his foes, helping to put out fires or damage certain enemies. Like with his movement options, you can chain the water spray into your movement, creating a water shield as you charge through fire or becoming an incredibly heavy sprinkler as you bounce through the sky. Again, loads of potential for really engaging and memorable levels but Tembo never steps out of the box to do something new and fresh. Unfortunately, it simply does not have the flair or originality of series like Donkey Kong Country to make it an experience to return to.

Tourists were shocked as their lovely hike was ruined by a freedom fighting elephant.

For example, the settings for each zone aren’t exactly the most inspired picks in platformer history. Zone 1 is a city, Zone 2 is a meadow and then a cliff climb while Zone 3 is a theme park which seems to be Game Freak basically picking and choosing the most popular settings from Donkey Kong and Sonic, then slapping them together. Zone 3 which is set in Zappo Park not only looks like the multitude of casino/theme park levels in Sonic games but also uses the exact same obstacles like bumpers to bounce off of, a pinball machine to ping around in and then fails to add any of its own unique flair. As for Zone 2, the meadow level you start does just feel like a reskinned Donkey Kong Country Returns level. With Tembo only have 18 levels, with 4 of them being boss encounters, 3 of them being levels with the same PHANTOM base motif and 1 just being a straight up enemy rush, the lack of new ideas or mechanical switch ups is really disappointing, especially since the game is quite short and the core movement is fun.

Progression works a little differently in Tembo than it does in most platformers. While many games just unlock the next zone once you successfully complete every stage or some might gate off the last area until you’ve collected enough shiny objects in a level, you can reach the PHANTOM base for each zone until you have defeated enough of their ground troops. Every stage has a troop counter, tracking the number of enemies you have defeated and the game constantly tracks your overall score. For the first two zones, the unlock requirement for the bases is quite rigorous, forcing you replay levels if you didn’t defeat about 75% of the PHANTOM army. However, you are at such a high troop count when you reach the 3rd zone, the final unlock gate is really low and will probably be surpassed within the first level, making the whole exercise of the unlock counters pretty useless.

As for bosses, besides the one that is a disco ball which you punt around the room, they are all just big robots with no real personality to them. With a game which puts such emphasis on the badass nature of their main character, I’m surprised there wasn’t a fight with an evil series of other jungle creatures which would have at least made of some colourful villains. The final fight with the PHANTOM commander will have you tearing your hair out, while the first boss can be felled in under 14 seconds.

Tembo seems to hate peoples’ property as much as he does PHANTOM.

One major sin it commits in this modern age of platformers is the fact it still clings onto the archaic lives system. You can only get more lives by gathering 300 peanuts and seeing as the game can get pretty difficult, especially when it throws loads of enemies at you in a confined space, it makes keeping lives a tough ordeal. We are no longer living in the arcade era, a traditional lives system is just an arbitrary way of inflating difficulty and has no reason to be in modern platformers, especially when titles like Shovel Knight have shown how you can have a death system which is both punishing and fair.

Presentation wise, the art style of Tembo is great, having a close similarity to the art style used in the cartoon Gravity Falls. Tembo’s animations are great, with his trunk morphing into a makeshift hammer when he does an uppercut or doing a sliding tackle whenever you hit the dash button while crouching. Like so much else in Tembo though, this great animation and art is simply underutilised, with Shell Island paling in comparison to other platformer worlds like DK Island or the Mushroom Kingdom. The music is also underwhelming with it being way too quiet and not at all memorable. The only things I can really remember about Tembo’s soundtrack is that the stage clear fanfare seems very quiet, the overworld theme for most levels has a section which makes it sound a lot like the Pokemon Gym music and that the Zappo Land theme sounds almost exactly like the Shop music from the Disgaea series. They are uncanny in how similar they are.

So, the bottom line that while Tembo the Badass Elephant’s core running, dashing and slamming are very enjoyable, the surrounding package is nothing more than serviceable. The art style is striking, but the enemy and level designs are pedestrian. The levels are well crafted, but follow previous platformer tropes so close to the letter that they don’t leave a lasting impression. You will have somewhat of a good time with Tembo, if it is quite short, but the overriding feeling is that it could have been so much more.