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Tonic Trouble Review
Noel Brady
00/12/0000
Is Tonic Trouble up to Ubisoft's other 3D platform effort???
You only have to look at Tonic Trouble to see it's roots. Ed, the game's janitorial hero and main character, hops happily along colorful 3D environments, completely oblivious to the fact that he has no connecting joints. His hands and feet seemingly hang by his side. He has no arms or legs. It's all very stylistic, of course, but it's hardly unique. The similarities between Tonic Trouble and Rayman are not limited to graphics though. Both games also play very much alike. They both revolve around simple, tried-and-true platformer and exploration mechanics.
The name Tonic Trouble comes from the game's off-the-wall storyline. One day while travelling through space, Ed clumsily spills the tonic he is drinking onto Earth below and trouble begins. The drink has a unique effect on the planet, transforming it's lands and inhabitants into strange, psychedelic mutations. Water turns to a rainbow colored punch, tomatoes grow teeth and begin hopping around, toasters go insane and a Viking named Grogh proclaims himself master of the Earth. Ed, realising what his accident has caused, decides to take action. The adventure begins with the main character making his way to the planet below.
After a short cut-scene, in which Ed makes a rather bumpy landing at the top of a mountain, it's time for you to assume control. The first task of the day is to get Ed down onto level ground and for this he improvises a makeshift sledge. Cue a bizarre 1080-degree-style rollercoaster ride down the sheer face of an icy peak, collecting elements of the antidote along the way!
Once you've safely reached the bottom of the slope the main part of the game begins. However, as there are 20 pieces of the antidote scattered down the mountainside and you need to collect every piece in the game before you can complete it, the chances are (unless you were particularly lucky on your first run) that you're going to need to come back to the sledding again at some later date. Your task for now though is to make contact with members of the Earth resistance and rescue the Doc, a rather eccentric inventor whose technical skills are essential to Ed's success.
Tonic Trouble is a 3-D adventure game in the same vein as Banjo Kazooie and the rather ghastly A Bug's Life, with the emphasis firmly on puzzle-solving. Once you've rescued the Doc there are then six different tasks that you need to complete, each of which involves finding various components for a machine which will grant you access to the fortress where the tonic can is being kept.
Although you can wander around the land of Tonic Trouble more or less as you please, the gameplay itself is fairly linear. When you start the game, Ed is a fairly useless character who can jump and run and... that's about it. He has no offensive capabilities whatsoever until he finds his all-important stick. With the stick Ed can activate switches, control machinery, hit monsters and even shoot projectiles.
In addition to the mighty stick, after each successful mission Ed gains a new ability, ranging from flight to shape changing. With each new talent a new area opens up, and to further complicate matters there are certain things in some sections of certain levels which can only be tackled once you've completed the rest of that area and gained a new power. In this way, you have to visit most areas at least twice and thus the longevity of the game increases.
The control setup can be described as standard. Ed is manipulated with the analog joystick, while the A button works to jump and the B button makes the character use his stick weapon. A combination of buttons also activate specific extras. For example, Ed can go into blowpipe mode by pressing R button, in which case pressing B serves to shoot bees. Players can fly in specific areas by pressing the A button twice while in the air. Ed can also swim, pogo, change into different characters and become Super Ed, a barbaric version of his former self that can bend bars, kick and slap enemies.
There are some control issues. Ed's feet feel as if they are glued to the ground. When he moves, it looks as though he is being dragged along against his will. Perhaps he is. Partly because of this small, seemingly unimportant detail, the game never feels quite right. Without a doubt, though, Tonic Trouble's biggest problem is its generic feel. We look at it, we play around with it and we feel as if we've seen and done it all before. There's no motivation to keep playing at all. How can we be made to search out items, face-off with enemies and overcome puzzles if they don't offer us anything new and, quite frankly, we just don't care to keep playing?
The puzzles in the game are, on the whole, fairly simplistic in design. They usually involve moving a block to a specific location, shooting a number of targets or something else equally basic. It's probably fair to say that Tonic Trouble is aimed at a considerably younger audience demographic than a title like Turok: Rage Wars, as evidenced by both the cartoony nature of the graphics and animation as well as the difficulty level of the game itself. That's not to say that this game isn't going to appeal to older players - the visual humour is fairly adult-oriented, and while the gameplay isn't going to have you up night after night sweating to get past a specific section, it's pretty damn tricky in places.
Visually, Tonic Trouble wants to be Rayman 2, which makes perfect sense considering that both games were designed by the same person. Unfortunately, though, Tonic simply can't compare with Rayman in terms of visual brilliance. This is not to say that it's an ugly game. Character models and levels are well designed and framerate is never an issue. Texture quality, though, is nowhere close to that of Rayman 2. It's also a bit slower, doesn't run in high-resolution mode and doesn't feature the quality of animation that Rayman does. The graphics have an odd, dithered effect about them in some areas of the game. And how many times will we have to watch Ed be sucked through a portal piece by piece before it's enough?
The only real problem with Tonic Trouble is down to the camera. It can be a bit of a pain at times when you're trying to move fast and it did result in one or two tumbles into ravines when it failed to adjust fast enough to reveal the drop in time. That said though, the camera system has come on a long way since the preview versions of the game and shouldn't prove too annoying for the most part. Just one thing, though. You get three camera options - Static, Dynamic and One Second. With Dynamic the camera moves around to track you and with One Second it does the same but waits a second after you've stopped moving before it shifts, thus preventing the controls going all awkward when the perspective changes. Now you'd think that Static would mean not-moving wouldn't you? But it doesn't! if anything, the camera jumps around more than when it's set on Dynamic! Perhaps the options lost a little something in the translation from French...
Tonic Trouble is a fairly challenging, extremely enjoyable, slightly wacky 3-D graphic adventure that should appeal to gamers of all ages. While nothing, including control, design or graphics, can be described as poor, none of it is exceptionally good either. We are left with a game that is neither particularly good nor bad. It's not Rayman 2, Donkey Kong 64 or Banjo-Kazooie but it's still a good title that's well worth buying if you're a platforming fan.
