Tornado Outbreak

by Konami

Product Features

• Compete in time, point and collection based challenges with the option of playing through the story or fueling the excitement with added goals
• Delivers new character abilities throughout the game including enhanced movements and combo options
• Expansive sandbox type gameplay and real time destruction allows gamers to destroy what they want, when they want, WHERE they want!
• Twist your way through crazy objects and comical characters expanding your tornado by auto collecting or implementing the advanced chain collecting-mode for more skilled players to snuff out villainous creatures
• Double the destruction by playing cooperatively with a friend in multiplayer mode

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002BSA1WQ
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches ; 4 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: September 29, 2009
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,586 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: Xbox 360

Harness the power of a raging tornado and battle the forces of evil in an effort to save to world! Sinister forces have deceived you to believe that your destructive behavior will save an epic hero. In reality, you’re working for evil. Take control of a dynamic tornado as you tear through open environments chewing up the landscape and spitting out everything in your path. The more you destroy, the bigger you grow as you work against time based, collection and point challenges in the search for hidden elements and enemies from another world. Watch the debris fly as you leave a trail of destruction, as you battle bosses and defeat the forces of evil. The world is your playground, tear it up!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A huge vortex of fun, October 4, 2009

By 

Simon Cooke "(Director of Engineering, BSc Ph... (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Tornado Outbreak (Video Game)

Its been quite a while since I've written a review for a game - ah, the heady halcyon days of being a writer for Your Sinclair magazine seem so far away in the past. (And frankly they are; that was 16 years ago, so if you remember that mag, you're getting old). But I really wanted to write a review for this one. Especially because there don't seem to be any out there. (I don't want it to fall through the cracks either - a lot of people I love worked very hard on this one, and they deserve some kudos for their work).

So What Is It?
You play one of a mighty band of Wind Warriors, set out to help their intergalactic friend in a story which is at best over-complicated, and at worse teutonically over-complicated. It's probably easiest to look at it this way:

* You're a tornado.
* You get points by sucking up things from the landscape.

It's pretty much a hoover-`em-up, in the best tradition of Katamari Damacy, and all of its spawned ilk. Except instead of rolling around a ball, you're a little guy who carries around his own personal tornado. Kind of like having the tornado-in-a-can from Mystery Men, or Taz the Tazmanian Devil on crank.

You start out as a little dust devil, and as you pick up more stuff, you become much bigger. Wayyy bigger. As you grow, you can suck up a wider swathe of the landscape around you, like Robin Williams trying to clean up after sneezing into his lines of coke.

Small things abound to suck up at first - plants, rocks, bushes - and quickly you start moving onto larger fare, including tanks, cyclotrons, Elvis impersonators, and most of the Vegas strip. Nothing can stand in your path, and everything satisfyingly (and sometimes comically) breaks into a bajillion pieces as you strafe past it. Or gets stripped to its underwear. Depends on what you zip past ;-)

Z-Axis of Gameplay

So you're probably thinking "OK, I get it. It's a Katamari clone. Where's the pizzazz? Where's the elan? Where the hell is the new gameplay that allegedly gets gamers salivating?" (As if a well-executed game wasn't enough in these days of very hit-and-miss titles).

Ends up that the reason you're in the middle of all this is because some nasty mischevious elementals called "Fire Fliers" are running around causing all kinds of havoc. You've got to hunt them out and get them before they turn the Earth's crust into the kind of lava-spilling soupy mess that extraterrestrials love to inflict on us. Except there's no Will Smith coming to save the day.

The FireFliers (which you have to collect against a time limit to make it to the next level) add a new dimension to the gameplay. Holding the right trigger lets you suck them up and hold them in place; the more you can string together, the more time you get added to your clock when you finally release it.

Ah, but there's a catch. The longer you hold the trigger down, the more your tornado slows down, until you're moving at a crawl, desperately trying to string together the last piece of your combo. Instead of just being a hunt around the world to find the next bigger thing to hoover up, this adds an element of strategy as you try to balance adding time to your clock with getting quickly around the level.

As you make it through the game, more moves become available to your tornado (stomping and ramming), unlocking other gameplay features.

There's also a race mode which comes before the boss battle in a way that's very reminiscent from the old 80s Aliens game (where you fly through the pipe to land your dropship at the start) or the chill-out mini-game in the middle of Tempest 2000.

Speaking of boss battles; it's a button mashing frenzy as you try to take out the totems, and a kind of mini game of Frogger as you try to make your way to them across the landscape, dodging fiery missiles and patches of sunlight which will fry your tornado.

So What's The Skinny?

All in all, this isn't really a next-gen game. But that's ok. It looks great even if it doesn't have specular lighting and normal maps everywhere - and to be honest, like Katamari (there goes that comparison again), it would probably suffer from looking flashy and shiny. It also doesn't matter, because there's a huge amount of particles, debris and flying cows hurling through the air at any time.

The game suffers a little from having you stay in the dark the whole time (so that your tornado doesn't fry, and also to hang a lampshade on the boundary on the playing field). So everything looks a little gloomy at times, but I can excuse that.

There's a bit of depth of field here and there, and the draw distance is pretty cool. Audio is pretty neat, with a great bombastic cinematic soundtrack, and cool sound effects for everything that you smash and pick up.

So... any complaints?

Well, yes. But they're not dealbreakers.

The sound on the very first opening screen is... well.. scratchy. It sounds like they put the Wii music in there by mistake, or overcompressed it.

There's a bit of slowdown here and there, but it's only very occasional, and doesn't affect gameplay.

When the camera's far out from the tornado (because it's big), it feels like the tornado is moving a smidge too slow for my taste.

Sometimes the camera angle is a little off - like when you're a HUGE tornado.

But all in all, these really don't matter. You're not going to sit on the title screen for long anyway, and everything else just melts away as soon as you start playing the variety of levels and go on a destructive frenzy.

Ultimately - and most importantly - this game is FUN.

Go on. Pick up a copy. You owe it to yourself - and your kids. And you can't beat the price.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great colorful fun, March 11, 2010

By 

Chris Samuel "moycon" (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Tornado Outbreak (Video Game)

I really liked this game. The graphics are colorful and cartoony. The game play reminded me a lot of a Katamari game. Really enjoyed this one.

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