Tembo the Badass Elephant is a game I've been interested in since its announcement back in 2015, didn't get until it was part of October 2019's Games with Gold, and which I didn't get around to until now. The game is published by SEGA of Sonic fame, and developed by Game Freak of Pokémon fame.
The game is a 2D platformer in which you play as the titular Tembo, an elephant with a past. Tembo was previously part of an elite military squad, and is now brought back in to stop the latest terror. Tembo's toolset include a run button/dash attack, a ground pound, a diagonal ground pound, an upwards hammer smash, and a crouch slide. These all work and feel good, and in general Tembo controls well. There's also a water cannon, which has limited storage capacity. When emptied, it can be refilled at the water dispensers dispersed throughout the stages. The cannon can either be shot in an arch with limited range, or used in conjunction with the dash attack to douse yourself in water while running, allowing you to run through or into burning obstacles and enemies. Fire is a common hazard, so water is essential, though whenever I used the water cannon I would shoot short bursts, so I rarely felt the need to replenish it except during segments where the cannon was the focus.
The game consisting of mostly linear stages, of which there are roughly 20 stages, including boss stages. While the stages are linear, there are often hidden areas to find. Most often these can be seen from the regular path, whether it's an item hinting at a secret area, a door or destructble object leading to a new area, or platforms and flowers that need water for activation. Sometimes an area is hidden by a leap of faith though, which is annoying as you have a sparse amount of extra lives.
Losing an extra life takes you back to the last checkpoint, and losing them all boots you out of the stage and gives you 5 lives. You can earn more by collecting 300 peanuts, which can be acquired in several ways. Individual ones are placed along the stage, but you can also get them from smashing crates, racking up a combo, or finding giant peanuts. From a combo, you gain the same amount as the combo total, so a combo of 20 gives you 20 peanuts. The giant peanuts gives you 50, which is the largest amount you can get. There are no separate extra-life pickups, so earning them is slow, bumping up the game's difficulty a bit.
Back to the hidden areas, these of course contain some of the collectibles found in a stage. Each stage has 10 citizens for you to find and an amount of enemies to kill. You get PHANTOM points for each civilian you rescue and for each enemy you kill in a runthrough of a stage, of which you need a certain amount at various points in the game in order to progress. Dying resets the progress you've made beyond the latest checkpoint. To 100% a stage you must do everything in one playthrough of the stage, which can be annoying due to how some of the enemy types behave.
The enemies are varied, both in behaviour and how to deal with them. Infantry with different weapon types, various small flying enemies, helicopters, tanks, robots, flaming skulls. Most enemies are small and only require you to hit them once to defeat them. Larger vehicular enemies require more hits and contain a pilot who pops out after the vehicle has been taken care of. If you don't pay attention, you may miss a pilot which will stop you from getting 100% that run. Some enemy behaviour also arbitrarily increase the game's difficulty at times.
The difficulty of the game is relatively straight forward. There are no upgrades, so Tembo at the start is just as capable as Tembo at the end. You have 5 hit points in a life, which can be replenished by 1 point from certain boxes. Enemies usually aren't much of a hassle and most platforming sections are simple enough. There are a few spikes though, mostly related to chase sections and late game stages. Chase sections has very small margins of error, basically requiring perfect runs to complete. As for late game stages, at times the amount of enemies thrown at you can be overwhelming. The enemies all act independently and need to be activated based on proximity, so timing the activations poorly can lead to situations where it's nigh impossible to avoid damage. Cooldown between enemies attacks are also short, so it can be hard to find an opening.
As for the arbitrary difficulty increase, some enemies - like the robot and the final boss - has attacks you need to wait for in order to deal damage to them. The problem with that is their attack patterns are random, which leads to situations where you can't reliably damage them as their other attacks block you from doing so. I had a run against the final boss where it shot missiles before every one of their hit-back attacks, blocking me from damaging it, and later had a run where it only shot missiles once in total. Some of their attacks aren't telegraphed that well either, so you never know what they might do next. If you need to wait for them to do their air attack, how can you know that's what they'll do if they disappear for a while before, can spawn elsewhere from where they were, and quickly land after appearing again?
Whenever people hear that a game has been developed using Unity, they often associate that with poor performance. For those people, I would like to point at Tembo as a game that runs great. I had no performance issues while playing, apart from when the game froze for a second after smashing the statue at the end of some stages, and - if it counts as performance - at times the game stopped responding to my movement input after dashing, requiring me to reset the stick position. While writing this I realized that I played the game on an Xbox Series X, so I can't judge its performance on an Xbox One, its original platform. Either way, it feels a bit weird praising a Game Freak game for performance after the recent controversy surrounding Pokémon Scarlet and Violet's performance.
All in all, apart from a few weird decisions with leap of faiths, random enemy patterns, and the extra life system, I enjoyed playing through Tembo. I clocked in at around 10 hours, playing through the stages slowly, trying to find every collectible. This should also include the time spent grinding extra lives for the 99 life achievement. Play through it if you want, but be wary of the late game difficulty.
