Game Review: Tornado Outbreak

McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

Tornado Outbreak

For: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii

From: Loose Cannon Studios/Konami

ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (cartoon violence)

The technology is there, and the desire has been there since "SimCity" let armchair mayors destroy their own cities with natural disasters. So it's a bit surprising that we had to wait this long for a game that lets us be a tornado and tear all that lay before us to smithereens.

At its core, and during its most satisfying moments, that's precisely what "Tornado Outbreak" does. Each level starts you out as a tiny twister that's no larger than a traffic cone. As you pick up smaller items, your funnel cloud grows, and the bigger you get, the larger the objects (or, in some cases, people) you can swoop up. Before long, you're free to carve through entire buildings like they're made of cotton.

"Outbreak's" gameplay sensibilities borrow heavily from those of "Katamari Damacy," and the satisfaction of engulfing a world that dwarfed you only moments earlier is similarly pronounced. The cartoony graphical style would seem to hamper the game's ability to satisfactorily illustrate the full destructive might of a tornado, but it does so only slightly.

"Outbreak" justifies the act of wrecking cities, parks and carnivals with a storyline that attempts to spin the exercise off as beneficial to the planet. It's absurd, but the game actually makes it work by designing some likable characters and supplying them with a startlingly good voice cast. That, in turn, allows it to rationalize boss fights and other challenges that add variety to the general wreckage levels.

"Outbreak" takes another page from "Damacy" by implementing conditions and time limits in those wreckage levels. Though it'd be fun if the game occasionally removed the clock and let you ravage a level at your leisure, the time limit does add the kind of challenge needed to keep the experience interesting past the novelty stage. "Outbreak" doesn't employ constrictive conditions, so the freedom to run wild doesn't go away.

Perhaps predictably, "Outbreak's" chief hang-ups also come straight out of "Damacy's" complaint box.

The camera is better here than in "Damacy," but it still struggles to accommodate a gameplay scale that changes quickly and dramatically. It's easy for your own tornadic magnificence to block your sightlines, which can create problems when precise movements are needed. It also makes it harder than necessary to spot each level's goal marker, which you need to reach before time runs out. "Outbreak" wants you to find the goal yourself while traversing the level, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating when you complete the mission but still fail a level because you spent a minute searching fruitlessly for the exit.

Like "Damacy," though, "Outbreak" is strangely enjoyable in spite of its aggravations, and it satisfies that destructive yearning in a family-friendly way. (That's doubly true if you bring along a friend for some two-player splitscreen co-op.) The price is right, too: "Outbreak" lacks the pizzazz of your typical $60 game, but there's more than enough content here to justify the $40 tag.

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