Game Freak spent two decades building Pokémon, a series about collecting creatures and calmly ordering them into turn-based combat. In 2015 the studio went the other way entirely. Tembo the Badass Elephant is a 2D side-scrolling action game about a seven-and-a-half-ton animal who solves problems by punching tanks. Sega published it on July 21, 2015, for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One. The game does not want to be clever. It wants you to smash things, and it is very good at that.
Trailer, via SEGA.
Shell City and General Krenman
The setup is comic-book nonsense, and it knows it. Shell City falls into a state of emergency when an army called Phantom, led by a mysterious masked commander, tears through the streets with war machines emblazoned with skulls. The National Army cannot contain the invasion. General Krenman looks at the mammoth task and calls on the only thing standing between the city and its obliteration: Tembo.
Your job is to jump, smash, punch, swing, and butt stomp through Phantom’s forces. A bird named Picolo comes along and helps. That is the whole premise, and Tembo never pretends otherwise.
Three Zones, One Quota
The structure is strict, and this is where the game starts to push back. Shell City is split into three zones, each holding three basic levels and an enemy base, followed by a boss stage. You cannot walk into a base whenever you like. Each one unlocks only after you kill a set quota of enemies on the levels before it. Clear all three zones and a fourth opens: two levels and the final boss.
Every stage asks the same two things of you. Reach the end, and destroy as much of Phantom as you can on the way. Innocent citizens sit scattered around each stage as prisoners. Rescue all of them and you earn a medal.
Tembo’s moveset is the real argument for the game. He smashes objects with his tusks, dashes, jumps, punches, and stomps with his body to break structures, enemies, and vehicles like tanks. He stores water in his trunk to put out fires or short out electrical traps. Health comes back through special crates. Collect 300 peanuts and you get an extra life, delivered as a can of peanut butter.
Tembo can also store water on his trunk to put out fires or shortcut electrical traps.
The environments are interactive, built so Tembo can unleash more destruction than the bare minimum requires. Momentum and destruction are the point. Puzzles turn up throughout, and they are the weakest part of the package — the game is far better when it lets you run than when it asks you to stop and think.
A Comic Book You Can Punch
The visuals borrow from cartoons and comic books, and the choice does real work. A game this loud needs a style that can absorb the noise, and the flat, inked look keeps the chaos readable while tanks and skull-marked war machines come apart around you.
The list of things Tembo does well is short and honest:
- Smashing tanks with his body
- Dashing through structures
- Stomping enemies flat
- Putting out fires with trunk water
- Rescuing caged citizens
None of it is complicated. All of it lands.
Where the Weight Sits
Tembo the Badass Elephant is a lean game, and lean cuts both ways. The enemy quotas that gate your progress are the design decision that matters most, because they turn every level into a chore you can fail. You are not allowed to sprint to the exit. You have to hunt, and hunting is less fun than rampaging. The hostage medals add a second reason to comb a stage you already cleared, which pads a game that did not need padding.
Set against that, the destruction holds up. Punching a tank as an elephant is a joke that does not wear out, and the water-in-trunk mechanic gives the move set one small piece of strategy beyond mashing. Seventeen levels is the right length for this idea. Any longer and the quotas would curdle the whole thing.
What matters here is that Game Freak proved it could build something outside its own house style, and that Sega was willing to publish it. What is noise is the scoring layer bolted on top — quotas, medals, extra lives — all of it inherited from a genre that Tembo does not really belong to. Strip those out and this is a sharper, meaner game. Keep them and it is still a good one, just one that occasionally forgets it is supposed to be fun.
Tembo the Badass Elephant is not the heaviest action adventure of 2015, whatever the marketing claimed. It is a tight, funny, well-built platformer with a scoring system that gets in its own way. That is worth your time, and it is worth the seven and a half tons.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
