At first glance, Tamarin looks like a riff on the cult classic Conker’s Bad Fur Day, with its cute and cuddly protagonist that mows down a fierce army of bugs that spout a level of gore that is unheard of in most E for everyone ESRB rated games (yes, this is E10+). It’s easy to see that the other furry protagonist was a clear inspiration for this game, which would make sense due to the developing team including a number of past Rare employees. With credits including Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye 64, Jet Force Gemini, and many others, it’s sad to see this is lacking one thing that Conker brought in droves – personality.
The game opens with a short cut scene showing the home of our hero, the nameless tamarin monkey, getting blown to Hell by an invading bug army. Their family is kidnapped, which is never explained as to why they were kidnapped and not murdered like the rest of the cast, and our monkey, let’s name him Failure for the sake of this review, sets off to rescue them and avenge his fallen friends. The story is essentially John Wick without the dog. Or the well-choreographed fight scenes.
Failure spends most of his time in this adventure collecting fireflies, coins, and birds (which if you’re not quick enough or are running through the world spraying and praying, will be killed by you or the enemy forces quicker than Mr. Wick can make a pencil disappear). Initially, I thought this was going to be a throwback to the collect-a-thons that the N64 era offered in bulk, but it really has more in common with a Metroidvania style game, although it’s lacking most of the good bits and pieces. As you progress, Failure will acquire additional abilities, such as a high jump, using trampoline-like assets to gain additional height, climbing, and so forth that opens up additional paths within the world. The major problem with this is there are only three major areas, so backtracking is a constant that becomes more and more annoying as you progress thanks to the complete lack of a map or waypoint, as well as the plain fact that everything looks essentially the same. There’s a forest, a forest around a lake, and a mountain setting. That’s it. As you can guess by the inexcusably small number of environments, the game is rather short. It took me around five and a half hours to finish it, and had I not gotten lost at almost every turn, I could’ve probably sprinted through this in half the time.
The short length is probably one of the best parts of the game; I really had to push myself through to the conclusion only because I was reviewing the game and in all reality, you can see just about everything it has to offer in the first twenty minutes. You could argue that I am not the targeted age group for the game, but I tried tag-teaming this with my kid, and despite getting a few ecstatic giggles when he’d blow off one of the ant’s heads the first few times, he was ready to move on to something as soon as he ran out of ammo, which is probably the single greatest challenge the game presents. Each gun runs on some sort of ammo, and can only be replenished by finding the rare ammo box that’s hidden in the environment, or by picking up the fallen guns from the insect army.
Throughout the title, you’ll interact with just one single character that speaks. A terrified hedgehog that is also nameless, and offers a vast array of weaponry in exchange for some of the currency you collect. You start with an Uzi that is about as inaccurate as it would be in real life, and quickly move up the ranks through all of the standard offerings up to an RPG. Across the board, the accuracy is an issue and becomes even more frustrating when you try to use the lock-on feature that will auto-aim you on the closest enemy, but then allow you to move the reticle within a small rectangle targeting specific body parts, akin to the aiming in the original Perfect Dark. This was something that wasn’t great then, but acceptable due to the freak of nature that was the N64 controller. Years of progress have made this mechanic as archaic as having to blow into a cartridge to get it to work properly.
In terms of tone, the game has a mixture of gore and fluff, but never leans far enough into one or the other to really be as crude as it should be to draw in the adults, or family friendly enough for kids of all ages. For my household, it was still kind of tame compared to other games I play with my seven year old, but it was extremely brutal at times as you shred the anthropomorphic insects like a wet paper bag; I’m honestly shocked this passed with anything under a Teen rating. It’s like the developers were unsure of what direction they were going until the game went gold and hit the presses. This overflows into the visual realm as well, as there are some decent textures like the individual strands of fur on Failure, or as the grass rustles through the breeze. But for everything that looks great, there are two or three things that look downright awful, like the interior spaces that would have looked dated by last generation standards. At times I felt like I would’ve had a better time popping in Conker: Live and Reloaded with upscaled 4K visuals more than this game. When we finally look at the music, it’s a synth-fest that has a tempo and pitch that would’ve been more at home in the next Hotline Miami than anything this game offers.
Tamarin isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played – it actually functions on most levels for what it is, but never meets what I would expect from a release this late in the current generation’s life cycle. From top to bottom, it’s mediocre at best. It lacks personality, any semblance of the pedigree that it originated, and is a black mark for the genre as a whole. The only place this deserves a home is in the dump as a makeshift ant hill, waiting for the incinerator.
2 out of 10
Pros
- It’s Relatively Short
- A Gratuitously Violent Children’s Game
- It Functions as a Game…
Cons
- …That is Mediocre Across The Board
- Tonally Uneven
- Complete Lack of Personality
- Feels Like an Alpha of the Original Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Tamarin was developed and published by Chameleon Games. The game is available on PC, PS4, and will be coming to X1. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of Tamarin , check out the developer’s site.
Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.
Check out OpenCritic for a better idea of how our review stacks against others.