After awaking from a night of heavy drinking with Blinky Bill, Ty (our tiger-like hero) barely has time to scratch himself before being sent to ‘the Dreaming’, an alternate dimension where he has to fight off the evil Quinkans who have overrun the place. Of course, Ty succeeds (unless the player controlling him is REALLY terrible at games), but on the way back in to his home town of Buramudgee, something strange happens in the vortex. Ty wakes up, and discovers he’s been missing for six months. In that time, the Quinkan have declared war on the native wildlife in Buramudgee, and Ty must set it right. Helping Ty along the way are a cast of characters made up primarily of Australian wildlife – including his girlfriend, Shazza (no, that is not a typo) the Fox.
Ty in a mech, chasing after Shazza. Heh, Shazza.
Ty 3 basically plays like your standard platformer . Jump onto platforms, collect a few hidden items, kill enemies, and occasionally knock over a boss. Ty is generally a pretty fun character to control, with his upgradable boomerangs and nippy handling (so to speak) making him fairly enjoyable to throw about. The game is structured slightly differently from your standard 3D platformers, though. Ty receives missions via a short cut scene – these generally occur as soon as the previous mission is complete. There are usually at least two missions available at one time, so in the incredibly unlikely event you get stuck, you can still progress. Missions are accessed from a large overworld, which is made to feel pathetically small, due to the fact that you navigate it with a vehicle at all times.
That’s right, vehicles play a large part in Ty 3. In fact, they’re involved in the action far too much. Whether it’s the airplane (with no vertical axis control – wah?), the crab vehicle thing (which you explore the overworld in), the go karts, or one of the different mechs (which all feel the same), they seem to dominate the action. It’s a bad thing, because none of them are as good to control as Ty is. On top of that, the vehicles are nigh-on indestructible. In the mechs, all you have to do is run around hitting the punch button, and eventually you will clear the area. Simply put, Ty out of the mech with his boomerangs is far more interesting than Ty in the mechs and their sub-par lasers. The vehicles are a good idea, but they are used far too often.
Ty is rangtastic.
Then there’s the cart racing. As well as being a separate mini game, it often crops up in single player too – race these people to win this prize and so forth. And, truth be told, it’s terrible. Carts either feel too floaty or too precise, depending on what the game feels like. They accelerate from zero to top speed instantly. The power-ups are overpowered, too, with, say, the lightning storm being able to take out the entire field without much effort. Collision detection is horrid. Then there’s the track design, which is simply a few rather sub-par re-workings of figure eights. Gah.
The entire game is aimed at the young ones, with its patronizing and stereotypical characters, rather simple gameplay and easy objectives. With that in mind, any adult or teenager will roll the game within a few days, should they want to. Kids will take a bit longer, which isn’t too bad, considering that they are the target demographic, and that the game has a budget price point. There’s also multiplayer available – but you would have to be pretty drunk to actually want to play it (it’s mostly cart racing, and a few other things).
Ty can't believe Slippy Toad was promoted to General in his absence.
Visually, Ty 3 is decent. Bright, primary colours are plentiful, creating an appealing landscape, even if said landscape is generally quite repetitive. Although, we did encounter a door three minutes into the game that you had to blast three times to break. However, it shows no sign of actually breaking – a crucial mistake that could see people not progressing further in the game. The characters are bright and unique, and actually pretty well detailed – you can see Ty’s facial expressions change depending on what he’s doing. Animation is not a problem, either.
The camera is not what it should be, though – it doesn’t seem to pan vertically when Ty is in motion, gets stuck on walls almost constantly, and is just too zoomed in. It is, however, a lot better than other cameras (see Shadow of the Colossus), so it’s workable. The biggest visual problem the game has lies in the cut-scenes. They are just so disjointed from the action, often cutting in with no warning, dialogue occasionally cutting out altogether, and well, they're just generally poorly implemented. The sound is not as good, though. Voice acting is… well, let’s just call it voice-overacting instead. Ty himself is the worst culprit, only having single lines of dialogue, each one uttered in a more annoying tone than the last. The music is not brilliant, with a completely inappropriate piece of dance music clogging the speakers up far too often.
Thing is, Ty 3 isn’t a bad game, taking its target demographic and budget price into account. If you have an age in double digits, you will probably find an overly simple and boring game here, which will struggle to hold your attention for anything over a few minutes. But, if you’re younger, or a parent looking for a cheap way to keep the kids entertained for a few days, Ty 3 isn’t a bad solution, with colourful characters and an easy ride to the finish. The fact is that there are a lot of better platformers out there which deserve your money first. Perhaps it’s time that Krome Studios retired the series and got to work on something a bit more substantial?
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