Tornado Review

What do cats and tornadoes have in common? Apparently more than you would think. Tornado is a game where you play as a cat that turns into a tornado and wrecks cities along the way. As nonsensical as that sounds, read on to find out why this Nintendo DS title is worth your attention.

Let me start off by expanding on the concept of Tornado. The idea is twofold: your main goal is to collect items, rescue characters and defeat bad guys. Your secondary goal, which isn’t so much an objective as it is a means to accomplish your main goal in each level, is to build up the size of your tornado – in turn strengthening it.

You may be wondering how you do that. Simple. You destroy things. The more you destroy the larger you can grow. If you have ever played or read about Katamari Damacy then you have a general understanding of what this game plays like. Instead of rolling things up into a ball you simply suck them up with your tornado. The whole open world map applies here also, except these are entire cities.

Now of course it is a little more complicated than that, but not by much. In order to get your tornado off the ground you will have to draw little circles on the DS touch screen. This is also done when you need to power up your tornado. Like the real world there are five different levels of tornado, with 1 being the weakest and 5 the strongest. The more of a city you destroy the more powerful your tornado will become.

As far as the graphics are concerned there is nothing breathtaking about this game. Sure, you get relatively large levels (ten of them), but the level of detail is not there, much like Katamari Damacy. Then again, Nintendo 64 graphics are quite common on the DS, so it is well within the majority of games on the Nintendo DS. Just do not expect hardware pushing visuals from this game.

Tornado does a fairly good job of being a fun game for small bursts. Its difficulty can get frustrating at times. Be prepared to quit for a few days before you come back to it. While it only comes with ten levels, they are relatively large and replaying them is a good probability. At the very least you will not beat the game, including restarts, for a good four or five hours. Throw in a multi-player mode as an Arcade mode where you replay the levels with the only goal being the destruction of the city and you have a solid package with decent replay value. Certainly not an exceptional title, but for $20 bucks it isn’t half bad.