It delivers some pretty nice ideas but the touch screen ends up being unresponsive, too fast action and a short game.
Tom and Jerry is a classic cartoon pretty everyone knows and love. Basically it was a story about a Cat trying to capture a mouse through every single possible way. It had a lot of cartoon violence like Tom the cat getting hit by a hammer, a bowling ball falling on his head, etc. The funny stuff was also the fact that the characters didn’t have voices in most of the episodes but by showing what they are thinking or doing you could pretty much imagine what they were saying. However as far as videogames well it isn’t such a great franchise, the most well known game of Tom and Jerry its Fits of Furry for the Nintendo 64. It was more of a fighting game throwing objects at each other all the characters that appear on the series. Yet there is a new generation of consoles and handhelds and so their first stop is on the Nintendo DS. This time around the gameplay is very similar to the TV cartoon, so were they able to finally pull off a really great adaptation of Tom and Jerry? Keep reading and find out.
In this game you control Jerry through a sort of obstacle course were you will be running on rails which is very limiting. They will be obstacles like: old bad cheese, spikes, water drinks, mouse traps, etc. Yet they also added special touch screen events that can sound really exciting but is not that much. The ideas are really great, for example to cut a table you will have to rub left and right the touch screen like if it was saw. Another one is rotating the touch screen in the circle that appears and you can rotate for example a CD player. Others are about touching a ball and never stop touching it until it reaches the end. All of these touch screen events activate traps for Tom and can make Tom’s possibilities to capture you less.
However the big problem here is that many of these touch screen games are sometimes unresponsive or obligate you to quickly do it just when it appears. For example there is a touch screen event about hitting circles in order they turn green but they turn green and disappear so fast it doesn’t let you even look at it. Same thing happens touching the ball until it reaches the end. It starts too soon and you need to touch it and hold it from beginning to end or else you lose a trap. The traps aren’t really necessary to progress but when Tom captures you, there is a random touch screen event which can be any of the events you already did before so if the most unresponsive comes then you are finish and have to start over.
On the visuals Tom and Jerry Tales looks pretty nice with some nice cel-shaded graphics and characters from the series appearing but the characters also get to look a bit square like Tom on his hands. While DS doesn’t have outstanding graphics there are still games like Metroid Prime Hunters and Mario Hoops that don’t deliver this sort of graphics. Still they did their best in recreating levels and characters from the series. Yet is very disappointing that the levels are big and you can’t go free roaming, it’s all on rails.
When it comes to audio there really isn’t much to talk about. They are no voiceovers in the game because there were never voices for these characters on the TV series. The music on the game is pretty repetitive and nothing really interesting and the sound effects do their best to make it feel more like the TV series which is great.
The normal game is really short that you can beat in about 1 hour depending how responsive is the touch screen. A nice thing about this game is that it delivers some special modes that keep things more different. In Timed mode, Jerry runs a race through the room, dodging obstacles that will slow him down. In Speed mode, Jerry flies using a jetpack, and players must guide him through colorful rings to collect points. Break mode is Jerry throwing cheese at fragile objects around the house with the touch screen. Sadly all tree modes run through rails like the normal mode in which players can only move Jerry left and right and make him jump. Sadly a mode like speed mode is pretty weird and seems out of place since the jerry we know never used a jetpack. The modes aren’t bad but they don’t add as much depth as you might expect to keep you playing. Overall Tom and Jerry Tales does bring some really great new ideas to the table but fails to expand the best ideas. With at times unresponsive touch screen and at the same time too fast action it will eventually get you all frustrated and not even keep playing. If you love Tom and Jerry and you consider yourself real good at thinking fast and doing fast touch screen action then you could rent this one. Yet it’s so short and offers very little and makes it a really hard recommendation to buy right away.