Hands on with Tornado Mania

We were recently lucky enough to be invited to Helsinki, the home of the European chunk of Digital Chocolate, to take a look behind the scenes of its studio.

As you might expect from the people who brought us Rollercoaster Rush, Tower Bloxx and Mafia Wars, there were plenty of interesting titles in development, from sequels to famous favourites to several brand new concepts (most of which we've agreed not to talk about just yet. Boo!)

However, one particular title rose above the others to catch our eye, Tornado Mania.

It's not an easy game to describe. As you might expect, the game involves a mighty tornado, which terrorises towns and cities uprooting trees and buildings. But as you might not expect, you're actually in control of the wind funnel and as you definitely wouldn't expect the aim of this wanton windy destruction is to create… a perfect town!

The plot surrounds the dreams of a mad genius to create a utopian city by literally ripping chunks out of existing towns and cities and transporting them to a secret location where they're plonked down to develop a whole new town that's even more utopian than Milton Keynes (albeit with fewer roundabouts).

If the concept sounds like a breath of fresh air, the control system is a veritable gust. In an attempt to capture the feel of manoeuvring a force of nature, the developer has done away with the conventional directional controls and instead you simply have a single button press to dictate the direction in which your cyclone cycles – either clockwise or anti-clockwise.

Whilst this sounds incredibly limiting on paper and indeed can feel a little counter-intuitive and clumsy at first, after a little practise the brilliance of the system becomes evident.

Although we became quite artful in manoeuvring our tornados after a few games and were able to both tear through farmland ripping up tractors and destroying barns as well as carefully circling a cottage to collect it, we rarely felt 100 per cent in control. This was exacerbated further as we progressed to the town and city levels and encountered a variety of power-ups affecting the speed and width of the cyclone's circles, as well as adding secondary tornados.

Yet crucially, the ultimate result was not frustration. Rather it all gives a heightened sense of the tornado's power and a manic edge to the action.

The only real question mark we have was whether the system will be able to sustain interest across 20-odd levels as well as it did over the four we played. In part though, the control system itself might not have to. Quite apart from the multiple complications on each map, there's the promise of various power-ups, an increasing variety of environments and buildings to destroy and the attentions of the authorities to contend with, which should all provide a deeper strategy challenge to keep players occupied.

In fact, this second part of the main game offers a separate Sim City style town-planning challenge, in which the player has to place the buildings collected from the world to build a utopian city. Although in truth we didn't get to progress too far on the version we were previewing, we saw enough to understand the scope of the challenge, and to predict this game will be responsible for sucking up a good proportion of our spare time.

What if you don't want to spend hours building a city? Fear not, Digital Chocolate has also built in a snappier destruction mode, in which the only aim is to flatten the city as quickly as possible.

All in all we feel confident about putting a hugely positive spin on Tornado Mania, which looks set to combine an innovative action challenge with strategic city-building depth.

When all this is topped off with Digital Chocolate's cute graphics and trademark humour (for example, the scoring system is based around the perception of the mad scientist's madness) the resulting game might just blow us away. Click 'Track It!' to get wind of our final verdict when we complete our review.