Ty the Tasmanian Tiger | Review

3D platformers are quite a rarity today, and it's a shame because they can be awesome and highly influential too, just look at Super Mario 64 and the acclaim that surrounds it. Even though they have a tendency to be simplistic in terms of gameplay mechanics and story, they are just fun, rewarding and challenging to play. Because of my passion for 3D platformers, I'm always on the lookout for new ones to try.

One particular series I missed out on was Ty The Tasmanian Tiger (as you can tell by the name of my blog, I can appreciate the use of alliteration). Ty has recently been getting some attention in the gaming world because of the upcoming remake of the original game (I say upcoming, it's actually on PC now, but in 'Early Access', meaning it's in a unfinished state, but is playable and available to buy). So I thought, why not revisit the original PS2 version of the game, and see what it's like.

Hmm... A 3D collectathon platformer set in Australia where the main character is an anthropomorphic orange marsupial with spiky hair and wearing no shirt but is wearing gloves and shorts? Remind you of anyone?

The story begins with Ty and his friend playing a game of tag in an Australian forest. Ty accidentally falls into a hole where he has a vision about a battle that took place between the other Tasmanian tigers and a cassowary (basically an ostrich) called 'Boss Cass'. Boss Cass wanted to take over Australia by stealing five talismans being guarded by the Tasmanian tigers, and was almost successful. However, as the talismans were taken from their resting place, a rift opened and caused all of the Tasmanian tigers to get pulled into it, but not before one of them throws a boomerang which scatters the talismans all across the country.

We then come back to present day, and upon hearing the fate of his ancestors, Ty decides to attempt to rescue his family and stop Boss Cass, who is now desperately searching for the five talismans.

After this initial introductory cutscene, you get more story details in between completing different sections of the game, for example you learn that an evil version of Ty is stalking you and you see what Boss Cass is up to while you're off on your adventure.

An evil version of the main character? How original! Also, his name turns out to be Sly. How about instead of playing this, you go and play the Sly series of games? Review spoilers: You would be sure to have more fun than playing Ty.

So, the game ends with Sly (the evil version of Ty) realising you aren't a threat and giving you his special boomerang to throw into a big machine Boss Cass is controlling thus destroying it, regaining the last talisman and saving Australia from being ruled by an evil tyrant. Ty also has a very awkward encounter when (what I assume to be) his Mum and Dad come out of the rift (which you might remember from the flashback at the start of the game).

I don't know why, but neither Ty nor his Mum or Dad say anything during this scene. Ty just walks over to them, gives them a hug, then turns around to face the camera, does a jump, then freeze frames at the height of his jump and the game ends. It's a very unrewarding and random ending.

Aside from the ending, the story is quite average for a 3D platformer. From the first cutscene, we know who the main characters are, we know the motives of Ty and Boss Cass (although we don't really know exactly why Boss Cass wants to take over Australia, but we can put it down to the fact that he's a bad guy, and bad guys always want to take over something). However, it does all seems a little bit forced and coincidental. It just so happens that Ty was playing tag near that certain hole and happens to fall into it? Not the most engaging story, but it gets the job done.

Why does Ty always look angry? Even when he's just running around he looks angry.

The gameplay of Ty The Tasmanian Tiger is very traditional of a 3D collectathon platformer. You start the game in a hub world area and from there you can access individual levels which all contain different collectables which do different things.

Talismans are the main collectible in the game, there are only five and most of the time you get them for completing three levels and defeating a boss. Then there's Opals, which are scattered across every level and require you to find three hundred of them to gain a Thunder Egg. Thunder Eggs are the equivalent of stars in Super Mario 64, they are used to open new levels and boss areas, and you gain them by completing various objectives in every level. You also find Golden Cogs scattered in the levels, but these are more hidden than Opals because there's only fifteen of them in each level. These Golden Cogs give you access to optional boomerangs, such as the Zoomerang (which is a long range boomerang), Multirang (which enables you to throw way more boomerangs than usual) and the Megarang (which bounces between enemies, letting you hit a number of them with one throw). Then there are five trapped creatures called Bilbies in each level, rescuing all five of these will grant you a Thunder Egg. And then finally, there are Rainbow Scales which are the only collectable in the hub world area. Getting all twenty five of these grants Ty with twice as much health, but you don't get any extra health granted to you until you collect all of them, making it a bit useless because you can't get them all until the end of the game anyway.

Not only all of this but there are also less important collectibles, like temporary power-ups such as a transformation power and a magnet power, 1-up collectibles (which are very scarce, but it doesn't matter because the odds are you'll hardly die anyway) and a separate collectible for health replenishment. Also (the collectibles never end...) you can find super secret picture frames, which (upon collecting all two hundred and fifty of them) enables you to view an outtake video from the main menu.

I know it's a collectathon, but they really went over the top with the collectables in this game. There's eleven types! That's a ridiculous amount and it makes it very hard to keep track of what each type does.

As far as the actual levels go, they are designed fairly openly, like in the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy or Super Mario 64. The water levels are the most openly designed but aside from that most levels are more maze-like instead of actually being open. This is very frustrating when you are trying to find the huge amount of collectables because everywhere looks the same. A couple of levels are designed in a more linear way, and these levels have their moments of being well designed, but for the most part, the levels are annoying and confusing. Almost every single level in the game has arrows pointing towards the end. If a game needs to literally put arrows in front of you to tell you where to go, you know it isn't well designed.

The fact that there are so many different types of level design in such a short game isn't a good thing either. It's like the designers didn't know what they were aiming to create. Did they want a linear level design like Crash Bandicoot? Did they want an open level design like Spyro the Dragon? Or did they want a maze-like layout like some levels in the 3D Gex games? Ty the Tasmanian Tiger attempts all three but fails to do any one of them well. I would use the expression “a jack of all trades, master of none” but Ty isn't even a jack of all trades.

I didn't know Gex would be making an appearance in this game!

Speaking of variety, Ty also includes some mini games. I actually think this is quite under utilised. There is a level where you are throwing boomerangs at an octopus's tentacles to help your friends get across a cave, a level where you use a snow ball gun to stop the enemies from starting a forest fire and a level where you make rocks fall on enemy's heads to stop them ambushing yet another friend of Ty's. I actually quite enjoyed the mini games and they do make a nice change from simply platforming and collecting, but these are some of the only examples of the mini games in the whole game. Each of the nine levels could have had way less Opals to collect, been shorter to complete, but each had two or three mini games to break the experience up a bit.

There is a little bit of variety in the game other than that found in the mini games, for example there are swimming and surfing sections, but the surfing is clunky to control and the camera doesn't turn corners quick enough to show you obstacles that are right in front of you. The swimming is alright, but is probably used slightly too much. It felt like almost every level had a swimming section and this is disappointing because this could have been used in one or two levels to make them stand out, but instead it just adds to the monotony of the experience.

This section with sharks is actually quite good, you need to hide in the cages to prevent them from biting you and travel from cage to cage only when the coast is clear. The problem is you can just swim fast and get around the sharks, making the whole cage system a bit pointless. But still. It had potential.

The bosses in the game are honestly some of the worst I've had the displeasure of playing. The first boss is a typical bull type boss, where it runs at you and you need to move out of the way in order to make it hit something behind you. The second boss is a shark, which actually had me puzzled for a while, but what you need to do is make it eat some meat, then go underwater and make an oxygen tank float to the surface and then the shark will eat the oxygen tank and you can make it explode in the shark's mouth. This one could have been a good boss, but there's absolutely no way it's going to hit you, as long as there's meat in the water, you're safe. Plus the pattern of the boss doesn't change at all, you just repeat the exact same thing three times. Normally a platformer boss will get harder to hit the lower it's health gets, at least that's how it works in good games. Then the third boss is a big robot pretending to be a Yeti, I honestly don't even know what I did to beat this boss. I just threw my boomerangs at it and it eventually melted into the ground and then started a second phase where I threw my boomerang at it more and it was defeated. This lack of clarity as to what you need to do also passes over to the forth and final boss in the game.

You start the final boss on a huge robot's back and you need to destroy several turrets. The problem is that you need to use the ice boomerang to freeze the turrets and then bite them. This is something that you never do in the game up until this point. It's extremely frustrating because it goes against what boss battles are supposed to do, which is force you to use all the information you've learned in the game all at one time to test your skill and knowledge of the game in a showdown against the main bad guy. It's not supposed to introduce new elements that late into the game!

Anyway, after that, you break a door down that looks like it's a part of the background (the door really should have just opened rather than requiring you to break it open). Then you use your fire boomerangs to destroy some electric wires. My problem with this is that (yet again) you never do this in the game until this point. But this time it's even worse because just before the boss you're given an electric boomerang. This electric boomerang does nothing at all during this boss fight, even if you use it on the electric wires (like you would assume you need to do having just been given it). It's literally used once in the whole game to open a gate in the hub world which gains you entrance to the last boss level, what an absolutely pointless design choice that was.

Getting back to the final boss, you cut the wires and then use a remote controlled boomerang to destroy the core of the robot, thus winning the battle. You don't even directly fight Boss Cass, which is very anticlimactic. Honestly, this is probably one of the worst bosses I've ever defeated in a 3D platformer and definitely one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, final bosses I've defeated.

Of course, like every other platformer, bouncy mushrooms are included.

The camera in Ty The Tasmanian Tiger is bad. It's not the worst, but it's very bad. From some reason the camera controls in the game are inverted and there's no way of changing it, if you try to move the camera left, it moves right and vice versa. The camera is also too close to Ty and it's too low down. A lot of the time I had to keep readjusting the camera to make it go higher up so I could see where I was jumping. You can deal with it when you're just running around, but for any kind of precision jumping, it's not good at all.

Speaking of jumping, this also isn't very good. You can glide by pressing the jump button in the middle of a jump but it's pretty much useless, you still fall too quickly and it makes little to no difference doing a glide and doing a normal jump. The only real thing gliding will do is stop you from taking fall damage. The standard jumping is clunky because it feels like you should be able to jump further than you actually do, so often you'll be falling off platforms simply because you misjudged the distance you can jump. The designers obviously knew the jumping felt awkward too because they created the levels so you can't die by messing up a jump, there's never a point where you can die from falling down a bottomless pit. I can't even think of another platformer that does this. Besides dying because of fall damage, there's no way you can die by messing up a jump. It just wastes your time by making you have to climb back up. I suppose you could see this as being a good thing, but if the whole reason this is implemented is because the jumping feels awkward, you should make the jumping better rather than changing how the levels are designed.

What is going on with Ty's mouth? Why couldn't he have a normal mouth? It looks like he's constantly about to mutter something behind your back.

The gameplay doesn't flow very well either and this is for multiple reasons. This is probably a problem that you've never heard someone complain about before because it's something that most other games don't have a problem with, but this game somehow manages to mess it up. So, let me explain what I mean by this. Ty is a typical 3D platformer so it's going to be relatively fast paced, jumping from platform to platform, and running around collecting stuff. The problem is that Ty does have a fast running and jumping speed (as would be expected) but this speed is completely halted by multiple mundane things.

His main melee attack is a bite, but using this attack will completely stop Ty in his tracks for a good second or so, meaning that you can be running around and then attack someone and be stopped just standing there, and then you continue running. This sudden change from a fast pace to a complete halt is jarring and becomes very annoying if you need to do multiple bite attacks in a row (which you do to defeat certain enemies). This wouldn't be too bad on it's own but another example of this pacing issue is when Ty grabs the ledge of a platform after almost missing a jump. What should happen is that he gets straight back up onto the platform or you can press the jump button to jump up from the hanging position, it should be instant so it doesn't halt the game in any way (for an example of a 3D platformer that does this perfectly, see Rayman 2: The Great Escape). But no, he has to do a pulling up animation that takes two seconds, during which you aren't moving at all. So you go from a quick movement speed, jumping through the air, to a complete halt. It ruins the pacing of the game completely.

Ty is filled with Australian stereotypes, there's even Cricket playing enemies!

Think that's it? Well, yet another pacing issue is the speed at which you change weapons. It takes so long to scroll through the different types of boomerang, it's not like you just press the button and it's instantly swapped, it has to go through a text scrolling animation, and it not only leaves you wide open to be attacked (because you can't throw your boomerangs in the middle of switching) but it will also result in you standing still while you fiddle around trying to find the right weapon.

The biggest problem with the gameplay though, is that it focuses too heavily on collecting. Obviously the main objective of a collectathon is to collect hidden items. But other games also have a heavy emphasis on platforming, puzzles, vehicle sections and mini games. The entirety of the difficulty isn't supposed to be in the actual finding and collection of the items, but in doing something in order to be able to get that specific item (like a puzzle, or any of the other things I listed above). In Ty The Tasmanian Tiger, the designers tried to create difficulty by just over-populating the levels with collectables, which ultimately doesn't make the game difficult, it makes the levels take a long time to collect everything, but just because something takes a long time doesn't make it hard. There's no legitimate difficulty in the platforming (partially due to the fact that you can't die from falling and primarily due to the fact that the platforming is insultingly easy), there's no puzzles, not many mini games and not many vehicle sections (aside from one level which is entirely a vehicle section, and it lasts too long).

This English frog character makes you travel around a whole level two times, all for him to get home and make a cup of tea. So at least it's not only Australian stereotypes!

On the surface the graphics look pretty good for an early PlayStation 2 platformer. They are by no means the best, but they look good. But while the actual graphics are good and smooth, the visual design is very bland and repetitive. There are nine levels in the game (not counting boss areas), and there are only three themes, a rainforest, desert and snow theme (at a push you could argue there's a swamp theme but it looks very similar to the rainforest). This makes the game very unappealing because there's hardly anything that separates each level. It gets boring to look at and I probably could have overlooked some of the gameplay flaws if the levels had been interestingly designed.

When we take a look at a similar game, Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped for example, it has thirty levels and in those thirty levels it has ten themes. Sure you could argue that the ratio of themes to levels is the same, but the levels in Crash are a lot shorter, so that argument is invalid. Crash Bandicoot 3 was released four years prior to Ty and it was on a older (substantially less powerful) console yet it has over three times the amount of visual variety Ty the Tasmanian Tiger has because it has ten themes whereas Ty has three.

This final boss section is one of the worst designed levels I've ever played in a video game. Seriously terrible.

The music reflects the visuals perfectly. Although it isn't bad, it's very boring and repetitive, especially for a 3D platformer. However it does do a good job of reinforcing the Australian theme, there's plenty of didgeridoo action going on.

When the game is being more slow paced (for example in the swamp level), the music reflects this and matches what is going on visually. However during the boss battles and more upbeat levels the music falls flat completely, it just doesn't get you excited and ends up adding to the feeling of boredom. Plus the tracks for each level aren't very long and you can be on the same level for upwards of half an hour. A lot more effort and time could have been put into the soundtrack.

As far as positives I have for the game's sound go, the general sound design is great. There’s different sounds for when Ty is walking on different surfaces, there's background noise coming from the environments Ty finds himself in. It does a good job of keeping you immersed and believing the game world is alive. I do think that the boomerang throwing noise could be a little less overbearing, but that's a minor flaw, especially when you consider the other flaws with the game.

Honestly I could have kept talking about the things that Ty The Tasmanian Tiger does badly but I thought I would keep the review to the things it does worst. The bottom line is that it just isn't designed well. I found myself from a very early point in the game just playing it in order to review it, I wasn't enjoying the experience at all.

It's a poor platformer and a bad game that isn't bad enough to be entertaining (like Bubsy 3D), but bad enough to be worse than mediocre and that's the worst thing a game can be. I wouldn't recommend this game at all unless you were absolutely desperate for a 3D platformer or were actively searching for a bad game. It's highly forgettable and a complete bore to get through, with very few redeeming features at all.

2/10

Pros

- Some good ideas, but poorly implemented and executed.

- Cutscene graphics are very good.

- Voice acting is decent most of the time, although sometimes cringey.

Cons

- Levels are far too long, badly designed and visually repetitive.

- Bland enemy designs, both visually and from a gameplay perspective.

- Too many collectibles which creates confusion, and they all unlock the same thing (more boomerang upgrades).

- Awful boss battles, especially the last and second-to-last bosses.

- Extremely under-utilised power-ups. The transformation power-up is utterly useless and is only found in two levels (as far as I'm aware).

- No real difficulty. The only 'difficulty' is in endlessly searching the same levels for collectables which give you no real benefit for finding.

- Little to no interaction with the game's environment.

- Music is boring and forgettable, especially during upbeat sections.