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Tornado DS

Format:
DS

Genre:
Adventuring

Buy/Support:
Support Rowan, click to buy via us...

Tornado is a neat, short game to keep you entertained for ages. Although it takes a while to click, once it does this little strategy action game will have you hooked!

To start off with you get a little introduction to the game in the form of some anime style little people called the Cosmic Cleaners (not the most original of names, but hey-ho). All the things on Earth are sucked into a massive black hole and are transported to, and here's the good bit, another Earth. For no apparent reason, the Cosmic Cleaners must put it back together again.

To play Tornado it's a simple matter of drawing circles around your chosen Comic Cleaner to turn them into a tornado. You must go around and transport things back to Earth. The more things you transport, the bigger you get, allowing you to transport bigger stuff and so on. As you play through fun story mode there are a variety of different things to do. A few boss fights, searching around the vast maps and locating certain objects and people in your group.

Though it's fun at first, searching and searching does get a little boring (at least, it bored me) once you've done it a few times. Variety would of helped the game a lot. Though the game is made on a pretty cool idea, it isn't without its drawbacks. The constant action of drawing circles on the screen, and there really is no way around that, it's a vital game feature, gets really tiring after a while, and trying to spend another five minutes drawing circles when you already have an aching hand is quite possibly the opposite of fun! Because of this drawback, Tornado is not a game you can play for more than around 20 minutes at a time, for fear of arthritis!

Now you might think that Tornado is a quick, easy game to play when you're bored. Actually, Tornado is quite the opposite: Once you get past the simpler levels, Tornado will have you frustrated, confused and hooked. I spent hours trying to beat one level, and when I did, yet another mission drew me in. This element of trickiness is both the games highlight and its fault. It's tricky and sometimes boring, but also hooking.

At first, it's hard to see why the game is so difficult, but then it becomes clear. The levels tend to be huge and are laid out in complex ways. The time you get to complete the levels is short; so short, that it doesn't make for a very relaxed game. In particular, one level, about halfway through the game, had me stumped for hours. I had to admit that, on my hundredth attempt, only blind luck resulted in me completing it.

Multiplayer mode enables you to play with around four friends, though you do have to have to have a copy of the game each, in a match where you all control tornados, but like the story mode, it has silly short time limits. Also, the chance of finding anyone else with the game is slim: I struggled to get a multiplayer game.

It's a pity that Tornado only features ten levels, as I'm sure that I would of played more, and enjoyed them! I found that graphics in Tornado are nothing special, but that seems not to matter, as the game doesn't need good graphics. All in all, Tornado is a neat DS game that once again demonstrates the amount of variety you can get in the world of DS. I'm certain that it will have you hooked for hours!

Written by Rowan Brown

You can support Rowan by buying Tornado



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Rowan Brown writes the Teen Gamer column.

"I write about my favourite games from a younger person's perspective. It's often surprising how different this ends up to other more grown up reviews."

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