Tornado Outbreak

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 Official Site

Tornado Outbreak is a game that feels strangely, exuberantly inadequate. It plays like some kind of odd take on the (admittedly already odd) Katamari Damacy franchise and is possessed of a bizarrely out of place tone. Or, it could be a completely brilliant and subversive tone. It is hard to say which one is accurate after playing through the game’s smallish campaign.

In Tornado Outbreak, you play as a Zephyr, taking on the role of a serious, brash young member of a squad of weather warriors. Your leader, the outrageous mentor and father Nimbus, (more on him later) leads his squad into dangerous situations that necessitate massive attacks of bad weather. In the case of the campaign, a special brand of foolishness has been committed to script, screen, and spoken word: your crew of wind warriors must find the six orbs belonging to Omegaton, a great inter-dimensional creature made of anti-matter who was thrown out of his realm and into ours.

Luckily for you, it only gets better from there. To aid Omegaton, the wind warriors must combat Fire Fliers, evil little fire demons, and destroy their fiery totems (all to uncover the hidden orbs). Since all of this action conveniently takes place on Earth, what all of this really means is that you get to ruin vast swaths of Earth’s surface by playing as a tornado.

The story is surprisingly well-written, if you like silly, overblown theatrics. It feels constantly dissonant, however, as if a Saturday morning cartoon had been spun through some kind of faux-intellectual blender. Every once in a while, Zephyr’s earnest narration just sounds off, and it’s surprisingly jarring.

Of course, the gameplay is what Tornado Outbreak focuses on, and it is where it needs to succeed thanks to its very low production values. From the first menu to the last level, the game looks mediocre at best for a 360 title. When you think about the fact that games like The Maw are released for XBLA every day, it’s a little underwhelming to see games that underperform in comparison, games that are priced at fifty dollars.

The game really does play like a weather-centric version of Katamari Damacy. You spend most of your time guiding a responsive tornado around various rural and industrial locations. As you destroy property and foliage, your tornado grows in strength and size.

The game is appreciably tactile. Everything you hit in the world causes the controller to rumble, and nearby buildings (that you are big enough to destroy) shake as if they were trying to escape their earthly bonds.

Each level is an absurd, absolutely giddy trip through some stylized, clichéd version of American life. You will tear up a Dinosaur Park, a military base, and Las Vegas among other locations. As you play, new modes and tactics are made available to you. Unfortunately, these often feel more like unpleasant obligations than interesting takes on old tactics. In fact, the same odd, incomplete feeling that dogs the mostly amusing cutscenes is back in full force here.

There are several mechanics that you learn as you progress, but all of them feel terribly insubstantial when compared to the unsurprisingly satisfying act of ruining entire metropolises and fighting hordes of strange little firefly enemies. In particular, the way that Zephyr defeats the giant Fire Flier totems is extremely anti-climactic. The game essentially devolves into a button mashing-fest, complete with annoying and frequent punishment for little slips and mistakes. It’s even more unfortunate because, in order to get close enough to beat up the totems, Zephyr has to play an amusing game of cat and mouse with sunlight. You see, Zephyr and the Wind Warriors are sensitive, even vulnerable, to sunlight. As such, cloud cover must be used in all encounters lest you feel the sun’s hot gaze.

Try as Tornado Outbreak might, it can never shake that funny feeling elicited by its opening cutscene and reinforced by every single bit of gameplay that follows. It does not feel like a kid’s game necessarily. There is no reason for such a game to suffer in any way, and there are plenty of kids games that feature great stories, fun worlds, and enticing gameplay. The problem with Tornado Outbreak is that it feels incomplete on a structural, tonal level, and it feels like even if it were complete, it would still be a pretty standard affair.

It comes down to this: Tornado Outbreak is a competent, lackluster title, which commits the sin of providing a bunch of little distractions and only little distractions. Games can get by with this kind of thing if they have a few main mechanics that are absolutely riveting. When a game’s main mechanic is almost less exciting than its various side games and minigames, then problems arise.

Tornado Outbreak feels like more than a missed chance. It feels like a bundle of them, all trying to distract you from their brethren’s failings. Its fun enough. and it will distract you for something like ten hours if you really enjoy the mediocre split screen multiplayer. But for everyone else, this is anything but a “must own” title. Approach it like you might approach a tornado: delicately and with trepidation.

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