Reviewed: November 21, 2005
Reviewed by: Ken Hutchinson
Publisher
Activision
Developer
Krome Studios
Released: October 12, 2005
Genre: Platform
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Everyone
7
8
7
8
7.5
Supported Features:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Activision, publisher of other adventure games such as Madagascar and Shark Tale, has released its latest installment to the Ty series: Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan. Krome Studios, who also worked on Ty’s 1 and 2, has brought out a nice platform/adventure game just in time for the holidays. If you’re looking for a fun game that isn’t too costly, you might want to consider Night of the Quinkan.
Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan has the following features:
- More story arcs - plotlines that envelop Ty’s adventures.
- Lots of story twists and drama.
- Mix of familiar and new themes/characters: Boss Cass, Shazza, Sly and more!
- Multi-player enabled: play co-op or head-to-head.
- All-new boomerang customization – 1000s of possible rangs!
- New vehicles! Crabmersible, Shadow Bunyip, Extreme Bunyip, and more! Plus, vehicle physics will now allow for jumps and other action elements.
- Air combat! For the first time, take the battle to the skies with the Gunyip plane.
- Friend-based missions – friends are no longer just mission givers – they take an active role in helping Ty.
You are Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, member of the Bush Rescue Squad. You start the game watching a cutscene that draws a connection between Ty’s 2 and 3. As you progress through the levels, the story is laid out with decent plot twists, giving more and more clues to what the mysterious evil is.
The beginning of the game is more concerned with rounding up all of the members of the Bush Rescue Squad, and the end is more concerned with uncovering the source of all of the evil. Throughout the course of the game, ran around looking for items to make my arsenal stronger.
The controls are very basic. It includes a button to jump, bite, and throw boomerangs among the essential moves. Its layout is easy on the fingers. The A button jumps and the B and X buttons attack. The R and L buttons target the enemies and go into a first-person zoom function respectively. Z brings up an objectives screen and the Y button brings up a screen to change boomerangs once you acquire different kinds. The actions are fairly responsive to pressing the buttons with the exception of the zoom function. There seems to be a second delay between holding the L button and the zoom view coming up on the screen.
There are issues with the camera. It doesn’t like to stay behind Ty at times. If you go around a bend, you’ll catch your camera watching you from the side instead of behind you. It becomes annoying moving the camera with you as you’re turning.
The gameplay is not too difficult. You have a life-bar, which can be depleted rather quickly at times. However, you have an unlimited supply of lives. So, although you may find yourself dying multiple times, you won’t have to worry about having to start a whole level over again. Once you die, you restart at a recent spot in the game, usually a part following a cutscene.
Going through the game offers you more than just beating up bad guys and finding switches. There are hidden things you can go about finding to increase the power of your weapons or unlock some hidden artwork for the extras menu. Though some of the items are fairly easy to find in the beginning of the game, you may spend quite some time looking for hidden items later on.
The simultaneous 2-player action only applies to the mini games, which include some aerial combat, Gunyip Battle, that attempts to mimic, but falls horribly shy of the quality of, Star Fox. The other mini game involves kart racing. Once again, the amount of time spent on this is similar to that spent on the dogfighting, very close to none. It takes the ideas of Mario Kart and applies them very, very poorly. I played the two a few times, and then lost interest in them. I’d rather have seen time spent on a cooperative storyline instead of these mini games.
The colors in this game are pretty vibrant. The characters aren’t exactly drawn in high detail, but the use of color by the graphics artists was done well. The colors aren’t as bright as those of Super Mario Sunshine, but then again, the coloring style is modeled off of Australia’s outback and Australian animals.
The cartoon renditions of the animals are done rather well. There are Tasmanian tigers, which are now an extinct animal, a kiwi, koalas, and a gecko to name a few. Although the characters are environments aren’t drawn to represent reality, it does give you an outback feel.
The cutscenes offer some fluid motion, although it isn’t of the greatest quality. The opening movie surpassed the quality of the majority of the in-game cutscenes by far. Even so, the animation, backgrounds, colors, and other elements remain above par as far as animated platform/adventure games go.
The menus are easy to navigate, being fairly straightforward in their presentation. The heads-up display is also easy to understand. It contains your life bar, which is represented by a paw. There is a map, which you can zoom in and out on, or simply shrink to keep it out of view.
You can tell the voice actors tried to maintain an Australian accent for much of the dialogue. Yet, at times it seems to be forgotten for a word or two. Aside from the accents, the voices seem to match up with their respective characters.
The music seems to give the slight feeling of being in the outback at times. Much of the time though, it’s merely just something to listen to in the background. It does do an adequate job of complementing the game and sound effects without ruining the gameplay. It is still subtle enough to blend in with the effects, though.
The sound effects are fairly typical. The boomerangs make a nice swooshing sound as they fly through the air. The one effect I found to be weird was the biting sound. It sounds like Ty is eating an apple. I can see the connection between the biting and eating. I just found it to be a slightly awkward choice.
The market puts the value of this game at $29.99. I could see that. That really isn’t a bad price for this game. Granted, the mini games are a big letdown when you’ve played the games that they try to imitate, the story mode still gives a fair amount of fun.
You can go through the game fairly quickly if you want to merely beat it as fast as possible. But, if you want everything, you’ll have plenty of hidden items things to find. Once you beat the story once, you may even want to go back and play again with different boomerang combinations. You won’t be able to do that very many times, though. If you liked Ty’s former releases, then you will probably want to pick up his latest installment. If you’ve never played any of them before, you still might want to give this a try.
Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan is an entertaining game for gamers in the young and middle-aged bracket. To adults, some may find it too childish, whereas others would enjoy it. With nice colors and somewhat amusing characters, the graphics come out to be rather pleasant to the eye. The cutscene animation could use a bit of work, but there isn’t much to complain in terms of the visuals.
The sounds and music aren’t really mind-blowing. But then, they aren’t bad either. There could have been slightly better voice acting in some scenes. The story does a good job of keeping the enjoyment of the game alive. Yes, you might put the game back on your shelf once you beat it, seeing as how the mini games don’t offer you much. Yet, you could actually take this game out a few months later and give it another run.