In the early 2000s every video game company had a mascot.

Nintendo and Sega had their video game legends Super Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog. Insomniac and Naughty Dog had Ratchet and Jak. Even Bungie had an iconic mascot for their Halo franchise with Master Chief.

This trend took the videogame industry by storm and even smaller companies began creating recognizable mascots of their own. Today, we are going to look at one of these smaller companies known as Krome Studios, the beloved creators of Ty The Tasmanian Tiger, and we are going to see how his game stacks up today.

Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is a 3D collectathon platform that immerses the player into the role of the title character, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. The plot is fairly simple, but one need to keep in mind that this game was designed with kids in mind as the primary audience.

In short, Ty is playing with some bilbies one day when he discovers an abandoned cave where he learns what truly happened to his parents. Many years ago, Boss Cass, an evil cassowary, was rampaging through the outback to gather the five talismans to rule over Australia. He was challenged by a brave band of boomerang wielding Tasmanian tigers.

The battle was fierce, but the Tasmanian tigers were ultimately defeated when Boss Cass used his talisman to tear open a portal and banish the Tasmanian tigers. However, as Ty’s father was being sucked into another dimension he threw one last boomerang to scatter the five remaining talismans around the outback and foil Boss Cass’ plan.

Ty feeling an immediate sense of purpose sets off on a quest to recover the talisman’s, save his parents, and defeat Boss Cass.

I can already hear you asking how he plans to do this, and the answer is simple, with boomerangs of course!

The main gameplay of Ty the Tasmanian tiger revolves around using your boomerangs to complete various tasks in each level to collect enough thunder eggs to power a machine that can locate the talisman.

This might sound like a simplistic game formula at first but trust me it’s not. Each level is full of six missions to accomplish like finding a koala’s missing children, winning a race with a platypus, or evicting a group of bats from a cave.

Successful completion of these activities will reward the player with a thunder egg. Likewise, each level also has 300 opals to collect and five bilbies to find, two activities that also reward the player with thunder eggs. Throughout my time with Ty, I can honestly say none of these activities felt boring or forced, because I was always rewarded for the effort I put in for each task with a thunder egg. This reward system in Ty truly makes every mission worth undertaking and brings the player closer to their goals.

Another aspect of Ty that makes every mission worth it is his moveset. There is something simply satisfying about throwing a boomerang at your enemies and watching them disappear into a puff of smoke. Ty doesn’t just use regular boomerangs though, and this is where some of the more creative aspects of Ty begin to shine

After collecting enough thunder eggs and defeating each zone’s boss, Ty is rewarded with special environmental boomerangs. The flamearang is great for burning spiderwebs, the frostyrang is great for melting fire, and the zappyrang is used to open the door to the final level.

Also, another great example of Ty rewarding its players is found in the special boomerangs like the multirang and the zoomerang that can be unlocked by collecting the 10 golden cogs in each level. These boomerangs aren’t required to beat the game, but I definitely recommend them for making your experience much more fun

These boomerangs along with Ty’s ability to glide and bite golden cogs to travel short distances make the gameplay of Ty one of the best aspects of this 3d collectathon platformer.

In conclusion I fully recommend Ty to gamers young and old. The story is a little silly, but you are a Tasmanian Tiger throwing boomerangs at all your problems, so some suspension of disbelief is required when picking up this game.

Once you look past that, Ty opens up to you with its ingenious levels and stellar gameplay. If you are a fan of 3D platformers and some truly fun gameplay head on down to the outback and play Ty The Tasmanian Tiger.