Tamarin

Not long ago, Nintendo released the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection, featuring several of the most celebrated 3D platformers of all time. These are iconic games that redefined our expectations for the genre, and their impact continues to be felt to this day. If you're looking for a 3D platformer that is the complete opposite of those ground-breaking games, then look no further than the awful Tamarin. Coming to us from the people who made SNK Allstar for mobile devices, this is one of the worst and most incompetent platformers you'll ever played. And that's before you get to the atrocious third-person shooting. Yeah, we need to talk about Tamarin.

This has been an exceptionally bad year for the adorable little monkey at the center of Tamarin. While COVID hasn't had a chance to spread to the forest, pollution and destruction has. In fact, things have gotten so bad that his home has burned down and reduced to rubble. With all of his woodland friends in danger and oppressive insects taking over, our tiny hero decides to fight back and save the forest.

While not wholly original, this is a solid enough setup for a cutesy 3D platformer. And that's what it is, at least for a while. We run and jump through colorful levels saving birds and collecting fireflies, which will open up new parts of the interconnected world and reveal additional powers and abilities. But just as you get used to rolling around and climbing up walls, the game switches gears entirely by adding handguns and uzis to the mix.

That's right, Tamarin is occasionally a third-person shooter. You'll go from gleefully hopping through the lush forest to filling your enemies full of lead as you gun everybody down. If that seems like an odd mix, then it's worth mentioning that Tamarin was developed by a team comprised of former Rare employees. You can see it in a lot of the design decisions, in both good and bad ways. The game whips wildly from a Banjo Kazooie-style platformer to a Jet Force Gemini shooter, with both halves coming up way short.

We should start with the more violent half, because it's the third-person shooting that ultimately tanks this game. My first instinct is to call it outdated, but that's not fair, because the awful gameplay wouldn't have felt equally archaic twenty years ago. Aiming the gun is floaty and never stops moving, which makes it feel like you're playing with a broken controller. There's never a point where I felt in control of where I was shooting, even in the rare times where the game let me lock on to the opponent. The aiming has a mind of its own, which leads to a lot of firefights where it's best to just keep shooting and hope that a few of the bullets connect. It doesn't help that you can't adjust the controls at all. You can't even invert the aim. It's so bad that you'll actively dread going into these action levels, because they are always more frustrating than fun.

But don't let the awfulness of the third-person shooting fool you into thinking the 3D platforming is good, because it also comes with a lot of problems. For one thing, our little monkey hero is a nightmare to control. He slips and slides all over the level, constantly falling off of ledges and smacking into enemies. He has limited moves and nothing that distinguishes him from every other adorable mascot character you've forgotten about in the last 25 years. The little monkey has no personality and is neither funny nor interesting. He's just out there looking for fireflies and trying to figure out where to go, all while fighting the unruly camera every step of the way.

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Believe it or not, it's the whole "trying to figure out where to go" thing that accounts for most of my frustration. The game wants you to freely explore the interconnected world and find new adventures, but that's riskier than it sounds. If you take the wrong turn, you're going to find yourself playing through a previous stage all over again. That means fighting the same enemies, solving the same puzzles, getting stuck in the same shoot 'em up screens and even taking on the boss. And because so much of the game looks the same, there's a chance you'll accidentally replay a completed stage multiple times for no reason. That's an additional 20 minutes of your time wasted, all because you mistakenly took the wrong exit.

But even if you're able to avoid the accidental backtracking, it's not like the stuff you're doing to progress the story is all that compelling. A lot of the game comes down to taking on platforming challenges in order to locate fireflies. These are usually timed events that have you racing through the level in a mad dash trying to collect a special item. The problem is that some of these challenges go on for an unreasonable amount of time. A good example is this coin dash found deep in the mountains. It has you running and climbing in order to collect all the coins before time runs out. But don't think it's over when you do that, because the game will want you to collect another batch of coins. And another. And another. And another. And if you don't complete the six legs of this challenge in time, then it's back to the very start, where you'll have to do it all over again. This is cruel, even by 3D platformer standards.

I could go on for hours complaining about Tamarin, because every single part of this game is flawed -- the 3D world is uninteresting, the platforming is outdated, the camera is unruly, the enemies are lame, the frame rate is inconsistent, the third-person shooting is a mess and there's never any reason to get invested in the story. The most impressive thing about this game is that it somehow manages to get every single thing wrong. Even the stuff that 3D platformers have been getting right for decades.

Look, I get it, this is a negative review. This game gets a lot wrong, so it's only fair to spend most of the time complaining. But I don't want to leave you with the impression that Tamarin is all bad, because there is one thing I genuinely like about this misguided platformer. For all its faults, I have to admit that I like the look of the game. The graphics are sharp and the world looks surprisingly realistic. The main hero may lack a personality, but at least he's cute and fuzzy. When I first saw him pop up on the screen, I figured it would be impossible to make me dislike such an adorable little face. Boy was I wrong.