Tornado Mania Exclusive First Look (ign.com)
- ign.com -
November 16, 2006 - One of the best things about mobile: Game budgets are small enough that developers can afford to take chances without blowing an entire quarter. Every once in a while, mobile sees some quiet innovations and brilliant game concepts that would never happen in the console space, because most of that sector is on auto-pilot. I have lauded Digital Chocolate's near-religious adherence to originality many times on this site, such as my recent 9.5 review of the hellzapoppin' Mafia Wars Yakuza. But this week, I may have played the game that will truly define the company from here on out: Tornado Mania.
This game would never happen on consoles. The concept is so sky high that I dunno who would touch it -- maybe Nintendo or the pre-hardware agnostic SEGA. You control a tornado created by a possibly mad scientist. The mechanics are simple. The tornado moves in clockwise arcs on its own, and when you press the action button, it starts twisting counter-clockwise. With just one-button, you arc around the game screen, encircling buildings and wreaking havoc.
Tornado Mania is two games in one. The first half is the constructive game, where you use the tornado to go out into the world and scoop up buildings to bring back to a utopia project before the globe falls into ruin. Once you circle the required buildings with your twister, the game switches over to a neat cross between Sim City and the town-building mechanics of Digital Chocolate's own Tower Bloxx. As you improve utopia (if that's even conceptually possible), your scientist's reputation increases via a series of headlines.
The second half is the destruct-a-thon that indulges the part of you that rooted for the tornado in "Twister." Using the same one-button mechanics, you swirl across cityscapes leaving chaos in your wake. Blow down a series of barns. Rip open a sports stadium. Get all Noam Chomsky on a television station.
In each part of the game, you must look out for helicopters bearing massive payloads of dry ice. Apparently, the power of a tornado can actually be impacted by large amounts of dry ice -- but there's just no practical way of mobilizing and delivering the necessary load to neutralize fast-moving tornados. In Tornado Mania, however, reality be damned -- those pesky humans deploy dry ice shipments with freakish and aggressive frequency. Every time you hit dry ice, the severity of your storm -- which you build by sucking up cities -- is depleted. Absorb too much dry ice and what's left of your tornado wouldn't even blow over Keira Knightley.
The concept behind Tornado Mania is just so fresh -- I cannot wait to get a final edition that has all of the game play pieces in place. I need to see if the final can deliver on all of this promise. And when I do, come back for a full review.
November 16, 2006 - One of the best things about mobile: Game budgets are small enough that developers can afford to take chances without blowing an entire quarter. Every once in a while, mobile sees some quiet innovations and brilliant game concepts that would never happen in the console space, because most of that sector is on auto-pilot. I have lauded Digital Chocolate's near-religious adherence to originality many times on this site, such as my recent 9.5 review of the hellzapoppin' Mafia Wars Yakuza. But this week, I may have played the game that will truly define the company from here on out: Tornado Mania.
This game would never happen on consoles. The concept is so sky high that I dunno who would touch it -- maybe Nintendo or the pre-hardware agnostic SEGA. You control a tornado created by a possibly mad scientist. The mechanics are simple. The tornado moves in clockwise arcs on its own, and when you press the action button, it starts twisting counter-clockwise. With just one-button, you arc around the game screen, encircling buildings and wreaking havoc.
Tornado Mania is two games in one. The first half is the constructive game, where you use the tornado to go out into the world and scoop up buildings to bring back to a utopia project before the globe falls into ruin. Once you circle the required buildings with your twister, the game switches over to a neat cross between Sim City and the town-building mechanics of Digital Chocolate's own Tower Bloxx. As you improve utopia (if that's even conceptually possible), your scientist's reputation increases via a series of headlines.
The second half is the destruct-a-thon that indulges the part of you that rooted for the tornado in "Twister." Using the same one-button mechanics, you swirl across cityscapes leaving chaos in your wake. Blow down a series of barns. Rip open a sports stadium. Get all Noam Chomsky on a television station.
In each part of the game, you must look out for helicopters bearing massive payloads of dry ice. Apparently, the power of a tornado can actually be impacted by large amounts of dry ice -- but there's just no practical way of mobilizing and delivering the necessary load to neutralize fast-moving tornados. In Tornado Mania, however, reality be damned -- those pesky humans deploy dry ice shipments with freakish and aggressive frequency. Every time you hit dry ice, the severity of your storm -- which you build by sucking up cities -- is depleted. Absorb too much dry ice and what's left of your tornado wouldn't even blow over Keira Knightley.
The concept behind Tornado Mania is just so fresh -- I cannot wait to get a final edition that has all of the game play pieces in place. I need to see if the final can deliver on all of this promise. And when I do, come back for a full review.
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