Though it doesn’t always allow you to play it the way it seems to beg to be played, it still manages to be enjoyable overall until the credits roll. Its charismatic protagonist, and the joy of stomping around and wrecking shop with him never got old, though the controls and level design would sometimes do as much to dampen the fun as facilitate it. Tembo the Badass Elephant wants you to smile, and often, I did. The two don’t exactly complement each other, and one is clearly more enjoyable than the other.
Tembo the Badass Elephant (PC, PS4 reviewed, Xbox One) Developer. One second you’re barreling through everything in sight and having a blast, and the next you’re stopping and backtracking to kill every last enemy so you can unlock the next level. While a few of the design choices are a bit odd, they dont overshadow the sum of its parts. Still, this staccato feel doesn’t prevent Tembo from being enjoyable it’s just hard not to envision how much better it could have been with a few tweaks to maximize the high points and minimize the lows. Almost everything has a wind up or some recovery time after, so it never feels like a slick, continuous flow of action. Partially due to that inconsistency, stringing together all the different possible actions into anything cohesive rarely works the way it seems like it should. Jumps alternate between feeling slow-moving and overly floaty, or too shallow and too long depending on whether you’re dashing when you leave the ground. Once the levels start calling for more careful platforming and the application of slide kicks, uppercuts, and water shooting, however, Tembo can feel as clumsy as an elephant on a conveyor belt. Everything feels responsive and enjoyable when you’re dashing in a straight line, butt-stomping through buildings and goring anything that gets in your way. The controls play into the stop-and-go pacing too. Game is an action platformer similar to Donkey Kong and is released by Sega. Note that some of those six hours were spent replaying levels since, somewhat annoyingly, some levels are locked until you’ve killed a certain number of enemies in each stage. Boss Fight Walkthrough For Tembo the Badass Elephant on PC. Granted, Tembo is by no means bad when it slows down it’s just considerably less fun than careening through levels with reckless abandon, which happened less and less frequently as I went. There are moments when that early rhythmic zen returns, but it’s usually unceremoniously stamped out shortly after.
Awkwardly spaced jumps, random hits from off-screen attacks, and enemies that force you to play a more measured game of pattern recognition bog down the pacing with increasing regularity through the second and third acts. It would be harsh to say the early momentum is “squandered,” but Tembo doesn’t exactly build on it as the six-hour campaign lumbers on. But past these early levels, that rhythm breaks down in a variety of ways.