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topatoi: The Great Tree Story on Playstation 3 Review.

topatoi: The Great Tree Story is a decent platformer with some clever puzzles, but it ultimately falls short due to poor control and weak graphics.

What’s It All About?

Putting you in the thimble spinning wheel like vehicle known as GEMMA, you play as Raph, the subject of a crash landing and the knight in shining armour who will save his girlfriend from kidnap.

There’s a story mode and additional platforming challenges available, with leaderboards and collectables providing further challenge.

What We Liked:

• Decent puzzles and level design. Despite being a platformer, topatoi relies on its puzzles for difficulty. These puzzles are excellently well conceived, making use of all of the game’s mechanics. A lot of the puzzles are physics based, requiring switch pressing and the movement of objects. Weights will sometimes come into play in various puzzles,  so you’ll need a sharp mind to progress through some levels. Nothing is impossible but the puzzles are certainly challenging and will require some amount of thinking.
• Original look and feel. topatoi is quite unlike any other game that you’ve played before. The spinning-top-esque mechanics are fairly original, requiring you to hit the R2 button to spin faster and the L2 button to slow down. Speed will be required to complete some of the game’s jumps and puzzles, but comes at a sacrifice of fuel and control. As such you’ll need to learn how to gain complete control over the GEMMA vehicle or you risk falling from the great tree. The game has an interesting look to it too. Character models are inherently ugly but widely original. The graphics can be rough but it’s an enjoyable world to be a part of.

What We Didn’t Like:

• Lack of control in a platformer. Given that topatoi is a platformer focused on making some long jumps, the game is terribly hit or miss with its controls. The GEMMA slips all over the place and the jump button is terribly inaccurate, seemingly responding on its own terms. There’s a fairly good checkpoint system in place to make up for the frustration but it would have been nice if topatoi controlled a bit better instead.
• Rough graphics. Despite an interesting looking universe, topatoi is plagued by blurred textures, ugly character models and rough objects. The poor graphics are compounded by a freezing frame-rate and other graphical glitches.