Tornado review

You try to make a decent run of it, but get stuck in the water. There’s a river running through town and although you can move from the land into the water anywhere the two touch, you can only climb out of the water and back onto land at the places where there’s a ramp. Keep in mind, you’re driving around a massive tornado.

So you run out of time and fail the mission. Oh well, you’ll just select “replay mission” from the menu that’s sure to pop up, right? Wrong. That’s when the whole cartridge reboots, complete with the opening parade of logos for the companies you are now starting to hate. We’ve never seen a game reboot every time you fail before – probably because it’s idiotic.

Luckily, the second time through, you beat the level – mostly because the batteries are all in the same place, so there’s little challenge to plowing through and finding them even with the narrow streets and your slow-starting, ramp-requiring cyclone. On to mission two, in which you have to… find one of your friends, who is hidden somewhere on the map. Possibly inside a building. Also, you have four minutes before the whole thing reboots again. Have fun!

To be fair, there’s also a sandbox-like, “just suck it all up” mode that unlocks when you’ve beaten each level, as well as a two-player versus mode that finds you racing to suck things up or change the color of crystals (which earned it a bonus point in our score below). But Tornado still just doesn’t have the suction to hold us for long.

Nov 25, 2008