Introduction

If you thought elephants were just for jungle safaris and awkward birthday cake moments, Tembo the Badass Elephant will politely stomp that assumption into a tank-sized pancake. On PS4 this 2D side-scroller from Game Freak (yes, the Pokémon folks) trades turn-based battles for blunt-force momentum: smash, dash, stomp, rescue, repeat. The game's hook is simple and ridiculous in the best way - you are Tembo, a cleanup crew of one, charged with liberating Shell City from the militarized Phantom. That setup lets the level design lean into power-fantasy chaos, but underneath the cartoon brawn there's a surprising amount of structure that shapes the challenge. This review zeroes in on what the game asks of you: the specific skills you need to master, the ways it pushes you to chain moves and think fast, and where that challenge occasionally trips over its own over-ambitious quota system.

Gameplay

Tembo's toolkit is charmingly straightforward, which makes it an excellent playground for building and testing raw mechanical skill. Your basic moves are smashing with tusks, jumping, dashing, punching, stomping, and - delightfully - storing water in your trunk to douse fires or disable electric traps. Learning when and how to combine these actions is the core challenge. Early levels teach you momentum: Tembo's dash is not a button you tap once and forget. It's a commitment. You commit to a charge to plow through barricades and vehicles, and you'll quickly learn that stopping on a dime is not an elephant's strong suit. The level design leans into that inertia, offering slopes, breakable objects, and enemy formations that reward you for keeping pace rather than poking timidly along. Platforming precision is more important than the first impression suggests. Despite Tembo's bulk, platforming sections demand careful timing of jumps and stomps, especially when hazards are layered: moving platforms, sudden tank fire, and environmental traps like electrical conduits you must short-circuit with trunk water. The trunk mechanic adds a resource-management wrinkle: you can scoop up water from puddles or hoses and use it strategically later. Skilled players will pre-load water before a hazard gauntlet, treating the trunk like a cooldown you must slot into your rhythm. That's a neat design win because it forces you to think ahead in a game that often lets you bulldoze everything in sight. Combat is less about complex combos and more about flow. Enemies and vehicles respond predictably to Tembo's moves, so the skill ceiling comes from chaining destructions without losing momentum or getting boxed in. There's a satisfying rhythm to smashing a line of infantry, bouncing off a tank, and using the resulting blast to clear a platform - a sequence that feels almost musical when executed cleanly. Picolo, the bird sidekick, tags along more for flavor and direction than complicated co-op mechanics, but the presence of an NPC helper subtly changes how you approach some encounters because the game occasionally uses Picolo to hint at environmental solutions. Two systems complicate and sharpen the challenge in different ways. First, the point and quota system. To unlock enemy bases - which are mandatory if you want to progress - you must rack up a set number of kills or points on previous stages. This incentivizes thorough, aggressive play: sniping hostages is not the point, you need to put on a destruction show. While that encourages mastery of flow and efficiency, it can bleed into grind territory. Some levels feel padded as you backtrack or replay sections looking for that last tank or crate to meet a quota. That grind is a design choice that rewards mechanical polish but punishes players who prefer a one-and-done run-through. Second, the rescue and medal objectives layer optional precision on top of the chaos. Prisoners are hidden around stages and require detours or careful movement to free. Collecting all hostages in a level awards a medal, which itself encourages exploring alternative approaches rather than straight-line blasting. High-level play therefore demands two different skill sets simultaneously: the ability to maintain destructive momentum for scoring, and the patience to slow down and perform precise platforming and searching for collectibles. Boss fights are where the game's action-movie inspirations show up loud and clear. Pattern recognition, quick reflexes, and exploiting environmental destruction become vital. Bosses are not overwhelmingly complex, but they're designed to be tests of everything you've learned: timing your dash to interrupt attacks, stomping for brief invulnerability windows, and using destructible scenery to your advantage. The overall difficulty curve is generous but not pampering. If you lean into the game's rhythm - learn how many steps it takes Tembo to come to a stop, where to store water, and how to bounce off enemy geometry - the levels flow into a satisfying loop of encounter, adaptation, and execution. The main friction point for the challenge-focused player is the point gating and the occasional repetition it creates. There are moments when the game's desire to have you master its systems edges into feeling like a forced grind, especially on later unlocks where you need to squeeze out extra points from levels you've already cleaned. Still, for players who enjoy optimizing runs, discovering shortcuts, and chaining destruction with both finesse and flair, Tembo delivers a focused, skill-forward experience.

Graphics

Visually, Tembo looks like a Saturday morning cartoon that really lifts. The art style leans heavily into bold lines, saturated colors, and comic-book panel energy. That aesthetic does important work for the gameplay: clear silhouettes make enemies and hazards readable even while chaos reigns, which is essential when speed and momentum are part of the challenge. Animations are exaggerated and satisfying - every stomp has weight, every dash has a satisfying blur, and destructible set pieces fall apart with cartoon physics that feel gratifying rather than punitive. PS4 performance is stable and crisp; there's no visual noise to distract from the demands of timing and spatial awareness. If you like your challenge served with a side of animated punch, Tembo's presentation complements the gameplay rather than getting in its way.

Conclusion

Tembo the Badass Elephant is a tightly focused action-platformer that asks you to master momentum, resource timing, and a curious mix of aggressive scoring and careful platforming. Its greatest strengths are how it turns simple moves into expressive tools and how its level design rewards players who want to optimize runs and chain environmental destruction. The downside is the quota-based gating that sometimes forces repeat play in a way that feels less like skill-testing and more like score-chasing for its own sake. For PS4 owners who enjoy rhythm, flow, and the satisfaction of a well-executed destruction combo, Tembo is a compact and joyful challenge. If you're easily soured by mandatory grinds or prefer slower exploration without pressure to rack up points, the game will still charm you visually but may leave you wishing the progression was a touch kinder. Score: 7/10 - a solid trunkful of fun with a couple of rough patches where the grind horns start honking.

See Latest Prices for Tembo the Badass Elephant on PS4 on Amazon

See Prices for Tembo the Badass Elephant on PS4 on Ebay