Review: Tornado (NDS)

That’s no joke either. Our soul was left in a crumpled heap as we tried to come to turns with the crippling controls and irritating characters. The whole experience goes a long way to make the player feel as miserable as possible. You start off in a tutorial where you’re shown the basic controls of Tornado by a bunch of Cartoon Network style furry creatures. The game shoots itself in the foot right from the off. To summon a tornado you have to move the stylus in a clockwise or anticlockwise motion around your character. Simple enough, but then to move the tornado you’ll need to not only move the stylus in the direction you want to travel, but also continue to draw a circle as you’re doing so. We were suffering from cramp straight from the start.

The circular motion also has to be constant because the level of your tornado increases as you gather up everything and you’ll need the highest level tornado to complete each stage. The stages are what really sent us into a fury. In each level you get a time limit, which right from the start is incredibly harsh. For the first level you need to acquire a number of parts and doing so you need to explore the sandbox you’re given in the hope of finding them. Problem is the sandbox is surprisingly large for the four minute time limit you’re given and some buildings require that your tornado has reached level 5, something that won’t happen till at least three minutes into the game. So that leaves you with one minute left to find the remaining items. To top it all off there’s no indication that a building can only be sucked up by a level 5 tornado, you just have to go up to it in the hope it will become uprooted.

The second level though is where we almost snapped the DS in half. Here you have to find one character in another similar environment. Now the little furry creature you’re hunting for only seems to hide in a level 5 building, and there is no possible way you can suck up all the buildings in the four minute time limit. So what you think becomes trial and error becomes even more irritating when you realise that the characters location is reset after each game. So winning the game quite literally comes down to luck and nothing more. Adding salt to the wound, every time you lose you’re thrown back to the title screen and have to endure the logos as if you’ve just reset the DS completely. Why no quick restart option?

For a game so obviously marketed at children the difficulty makes this impossible for anyone, even for a seasoned gaming veteran. Visuals are made up of rudimentary 3D and the music is nothing to shout about. You do get an added versus and arcade mode, but why would you even bother?

Tornado is one of the worst DS games we’ve played in quite a while. An interesting concept ruined by an impenetrable single player and a crippling control scheme. Avoid like the plague.

Rating: 2 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver