It’s not often that a videogame induces such a state of rage and anger these days, in fact gamers had never had it so good, you only need to take one look at all of the quality titles out on the shop shelves to buy this Christmas to realise that; unfortunately Ty the Tasmanian Tiger certainly is not one of those.<br><br>Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is a standard 3D multi-format platformer that appears to have come from nowhere and been completed in less then a year. Wearing the EA Games logo, you might have expected there to be a shred of quality, but oh no, in light of Ratchet & Clank and Super Mario Sunshine, it’s good to play a game like Ty to remind you what a decent platformer is all about.<br><br>Players assume the role of Ty, one of the last few remaining Tasmanian Tigers; during the first couple of hours I was convinced that he was a kangaroo as not only does he closely resemble one, but also hops around like one! Through the routine introduction you’ll learn that Ty is the sole remaining Tasmanian Tiger, however he still has brief memories of his family. That is until one day a Bunyip Elder(!) tells you that your family is still alive and well, the only problem is that they’re trapped in the otherworldly realm of DreamTime. All you have to do is to find the five sacred talismans to open up the portal and rescue them, but (and there’s always a but) an evil cassowary by the name of Boss Cass is after them after using them previously to banish your family; cue one of the most uninspired platformers we’ve played in a long time.<br><br>Ty shares many of the same attributes as other platformer characters; he can jump, throw his boomerangs and snap at opponents to kill them, as you progress through the game you’ll open up new skills such as being able to swim!!!<br><br>The first complaint that can be levelled at Ty, is the fact that it appears to have been quickly developed just to cash in. The signs of a rushed multi-format game are always immediately evident in the visuals; there’s no way this game can stand up to the variety of Xbox titles already out there, in fact we’d be disappointed to see this running on a PS2! For starters, besides the main character the character models sport very low polygon counts and have a very disjointed look to them, it isn’t helped by the fact that none of the characters are memorable and suffer from some atrocious designs. Unfortunately the environments have the same lack of charisma, there’s really nothing to grab you, as the distinctly unremarkable texture work and lack of any Xbox special effects, results in a game that in no way, shape or from resembles what you’d expect from an Xbox title. To be fair there are a couple of touches that look ok; grass moves in the wind and and the draw distance is nice, but why oh why couldn’t they have stretched the barrel a bit, for example depth-filtering would have made this game look twice as good.<br><br>Whilst the origins of multi-platform development take some time to get over, the biggest complaint that can be levelled at Ty is a complete lack of innovation or subtlety in blatantly stealing the rulebook set out in virtually every other 3D platformer.<br><br>Although it’s understood that virtually every platformer shares the same general rules set out by the likes of Mario and Sonic; i.e. collect coins/rings/bolts (delete as appropriate), jump on platforms and ultimately save the day from an evil threat, Ty goes nowhere near to introducing any new features or ideas. In fact it’s worse, whilst games such as Jax & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank have added to the mould by introducing comedy duos and placing more emphasis on combat, respectively; Ty simply rips all elements from every platformer that’s come before it. So you’ll find yourself having to collect Opals in the way that you would collect coins or rings, whilst collecting enough Golden Cogs provides you with more powerful Boomerangs to use against the enemy. So-called variation comes in freeing five of your friends who have been trapped in each of the 15 unremarkable levels, and ultimately collecting enough Thunder Eggs, which will transport the five sacred Talismans that you’ve got to find to save the day, it’s so pathetic that it borders on comedy, you’ll play simply to find what other platform cliché they’ve ripped off next.<br><br>After only a short while the Australian humour that your mates exhibit in the ‘witty’ dialogue will begin to grate, unfortunately the game is laden with dialogue but thankfully you can quite easily skip it all with rapid presses of the X button.<br><br>Level after level has been ripped from the Big Old Book of Platformers, so you’ll find the stereotypical water, fire, snow (Australia???) and sand stages. I’d like to try and say something nice about the game, but truly there is not a good word to say about this game; the levels are uninspired, you can tell the developers have tried to show some degree of level designing skills as you’ll find water-slides and snow-boarding sections to break up the monotonous platform action, but unfortunately these are usually duller then the platform action!<br>