[Review] Tamarin (PS4)
As a pastiche of Rare’s N64 days, Tamarin has charm and some pedigree, but its flaws can’t be ignored.
Tamarin marketed itself on its Rare legacy. Its heavy homage of both Jet Force Gemini and the Banjo-style 3D platformers was obvious to see, but it also had involvement from key ex-Rare personnel. Kev Bayliss and Steve Mayles contributed concept art and character designs, David Wise was commissioned for the soundtrack (and did an excellent job reminiscent of his recent work on Snake Pass and Tropical Freeze), Graeme Norgate did some sound work, and several other core team members are former Rare or Rare-adjacent devs. Having big names involved isn’t a guarantee of quality but it gave the project an air of authenticity, perhaps.
A perceived over-reliance on this legacy, coupled with a few big delays and the seeming use of default Unity assets soured some on the game before release, but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. The few teething issues at launch (bugs, performance problems) also seem to have been ironed out by the time I got around to playing it. There was even a semi-recent patch to optimise performance on PS5. It would take more significant work to smooth out the game’s design issues, though.
To back up, what we have is… not exactly a hybrid, more like two half-games stapled together. One half is cartoony platformer, with lush, pretty European landscapes to roam. The other is a Jet Force Gemini pastiche, a third-person shooter complete with hostage birds and the insectoid enemies pretty much lifted directly.
My main problem was common to both: the environments look samey and lack landmarks, so I was constantly getting lost and not knowing where to go next, and levels only get more intricate as you progress. You also need to double back a fair bit, and revisit earlier levels with later abilities to get everything; I tried this several times with one particular level but found I had no idea how to get there from the hub, or via shortcuts from other levels!
This navigation problem, and extra weapon unlocks being weighted to the back end, had me frequently convinced I’d missed something important. Turns out that yes there are only three shooter stages (two of which are identical-looking factories), but the endgame has you trek back through them all via alternate paths in a fourth shooter sequence, so don’t let the incomplete totals screen fool you.
Another problem that’s more impactful in the shooter bits is checkpointing. Health drops are scarce and checkpoints scarcer. Dying can set you back quite a ways, and if your health is low, it’s not restored after a death. This adds undue frustration to what are already clumsy gameplay segments, where awkward aiming mechanics dragged down the experience for me. You can lose progress in the platformer bits too, primarily an annoyance in the final world which is both labyrinthine and full of void-out zones.
If the shooting is clumsy and unfun, the platforming is at least ok. The sadly unnamed tamarin is an adorable fluffy mascot, and it feels pretty good to roll and pounce around. Less so when these moves are required to precisely defeat enemies on precarious ledges. In the Banjo mould you collect berries to pay for new moves, and fireflies to open new worlds (plus sometimes insect tokens as a separate currency used in the shooter bits). This is the game at its strongest for me, and it’s really just decent.
Again, having Rare people involved doesn’t guarantee an “N64 heyday” quality game. The seeming inexperience of other members and leaders on the team was surely a factor as well. But even if the shooter bits were improved, that doesn’t mean the two gameplay styles would mesh well together. Conker kind of pulled it off, but it was a setpiece-driven joke game that constantly reinvented itself. Here the only humour is the inherent absurdity of the cute tiny animal pulling out a gun and blasting limbs off monster ants, and even then Tamarin doesn’t lean into that disconnect, instead trying for earnest environmentalist themes.
I wanted to like this game. Heck, I wanted to do a 100% run but that was quickly stymied; if a bird is killed (all too easy when there’s dedicated enemies that gun for them, you can easily fell them yourself by accident, and there’s gotcha traps designed to catch you out) it’s permanently dead on that playthrough even if you revisit the area later… unless you load from your last checkpoint which could be ten minutes ago. As it is… I like parts of it, aspects of it. It certainly got too much flak from certain corners. I view it as a loving but misguided attempt to carry on the Rare torch from a young studio. There’s some flame in there for sure but you have to fight through some smoke to find it. Does that metaphor work? Whatever.
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