Game Review – Tornado.io! (Mobile – Free to Play)

In Tornado.io, you take control of a tornado, whizzing around a map and destroying everything in your path. The more you destroy, the bigger you get. Designed to be a little like a battle game, the map will have multiple other tornados in with you also trying to gobble up the scenery. Grow quicker than your opponents and swallow them up to score points, kills and wins.

This review is specific to version 1.0

Tornado.io is brought to us by Voodoo. A developer with a collection of popular games available like Helix Jump, Snake vs Block, Draw.io and Paper.io. Speaking about Tornado.io, the developer describes it as –

Make the whole world twist around you. Feel like a tornado. Make trees, and roofs of houses twist in the air. Destroy more and become bigger. Experience battle in a small arena. Fight with other tornados for first place. Challenge your friends in a total destruction. Make your opponents gone, with the wind.

Okay. Let’s move quickly on from that. Well, Tornado.io is a simple game. Often the better mobile games are but is this one of them or is it just another example of a developer chucking out any old rubbish in the hope of earning some ad revenue? It is a bit of both actually but mostly fun.

Tornado.io is an easy game to play. The premise is so simple, anyone can pick it up and be crashing around a map in seconds. You start off small, barely damaging trees but as you cause damage, you grow. You will soon be zooming around taking down tower blocks, multi story carparks and more. While you are doing this, there are other AI tornadoes zooming around trying eat everything up as well. These are of little concern though as they move slowly and grow at a fraction of the rate you do. It basically makes them just another part of the scenery to munch on.

The other tornadoes are the important bit though in regards to winning. The scenery is just for growth. You do pick up points from destroying the scenery but much more for kills. Kills are the eating of another tornado. Get enough points to finish the round top of the pile and you win. Still, after many, many attempts I have yet to even be nearly challenged for 1st position so it isn’t that tough to win.

Winning earns you points. Points allow you to change your skin to a different type of tornado. There are a few to choose from, like the Sharknado, the Rainbownado and even the Ninjanado. Some of them have specific challenges attached to unlocking them like earn a certain amount of points in Classic mode. That adds a little bit more longevity to the game. Another way longevity is added is through multiple game modes. There are three, though they are all essentially the same concept.

The first is classic mode, as discussed above. The second is called Slime Hunt. In this you hunt down 20 slimes that look remarkably like the little characters from the game So Many Me. The slime are differently sized so you need to eat the scenery to be able to grow and grab some of the bigger ones. Get them all before the timer runs out to win. The third mode is a bit more of a challenge and is just called Solo. In this you get a limited amount of time to try and destroy the whole map. There is a percentage destroyed counter so try to get through as much as you can before time is up. The higher the percentage destroyed, the more points you earn towards levelling up and unlocking skins.

In regards to controls, you drag your finger on the screen in a continuous direction to control which way the tornado moves. It works smoothly enough but as with a lot of these sorts of games, you may find yourself having to let go to move your finger back to the centre. This means you lose crucial time as your tornado is just static for a second here and there. The maps look great, nice and cartoony with lots of bright colours. The tornado itself looks good too.

There aren’t even any real in app purchases to make. You do get a short ad after each go but so far I have only had the 5 second ones that you can then close and there is a bottom banner ad but it is pretty unobtrusive.. You can pay to have these ads removed for the one off cost of £2.99 which seems reasonable. There is very little to complain about, which makes a nice change.

In fact, I only have 2 actual complaints. One very minor but one that is a big one. On to the minor one first. Silly thing maybe but a grammar error really irritates me. Coming first in the Slime Hunt Mode tells you that you came 1th instead of 1st. I hate that. On to the big one and that is that this game should be the dictionary definition of a battery killer. I have never quite seen anything like it. I played the game for about 5 minutes and measured my battery to see how much it would go down and it went down 7% in that 5 minutes. Hardly an exact science but that means Tornado.io would drain my full battery in around 70 minutes. That isn’t right.

Still, restrict yourself to short bursts of play and you should be alright. I don’t think Tornado.io has much in the way of longevity anyway but you should get a fair few days of good, honest fun out of it. Battery draining aside, well done Voodoo. This is a solid, fun to play game with no attempts to con money out of you.

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Tornado.io is available now on IOS and Android.