Tembo the Badass Elephant
Overview -
Game Freak, the masterminds behind the wildly successful 'Pokémon' franchise, occasionally work on other games. Their latest is 'Tembo the Badass Elephant', a platformer published by Sega for PC, Xbox One, and PS4.
Video Review
'Tembo' is very cartoonish, with lots of bright colors and stylized, comic book-style text exclamations whenever the pachyderm moves or kills something. The sharp edges almost give the game a hand-drawn look. Environments are nice, especially in the foreground, although the backgrounds can get fuzzy in some levels. The engine has a hard time keeping up with Tembo’s fast movement sometimes, especially when jumping after a long dash or killing an enemy.
Audio Review
The high-energy, cartoon theme continues into the audio, where an electronic spoof of action movies plays throughout the game. The sound effects are perfect, although the game as a whole has a low volume and I had to crank my audio up significantly to hear everything. There is no voice acting.
Final Thoughts
'Tembo the Badass Elephant' manages to rise above its silly name and offers a fun, fast platformer. It doesn’t have the personable story of 'Ori and the Blind Forest' or the charm of a 'Rayman', and it has a few issues with glitches, but there are far worse platformers to be had on the Xbox One.