The most stereotypically Australian collectathon you’ve probably ever seen on the PS2.
The plot of this game is kinda incomprehensable, and the game feels just a wee bit half baked (it feels like it’s missing two entire hub worlds, but thats besides the point.) Basically you’re an extremely Australian goober with a boomerang, and your entire tribe? family? species? group of other tiger people somehow all got kidnapped/disappeared by a bird named Boss Cass. After learning this much, the goal is simple: Find the talismans, and rescue your people. Or defeat Cass, something like that. That bird is bad news anyway.
Nah why I recommend this game is more about its vibes. It is so agressively Australian that I cannot help but love it. The developers, Krome Studios, are based from Australia, so they certainly know what they are doing, and it’s a good mixture of various locales and cultural ideas, mixed in with a bit of Aborigonal. The main characters are a tasmanian tiger, a cockatoo, and a koala, for heavens sake. Exploring the various forests, outbacks, and reefs is so interesting, and the game’s main interaction, its elemental boomerangs, adds a lot of depth to the interactions.
In terms of gameplay, Ty is a lot like Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie. The main collectable are thunder eggs, which are required to access the boss fights and complete each hub world, and there are a number of unique challenges in each stage that reward a thunder egg, as well as ones for finding the 5 trapped bilbies, and collecting all 300 opals, which are similar to SM64’s red coin and 100 coin stars. The stages are pretty big, especially for the time, lots of stuff to find and discover. One big caveat is that each hub room has a different element of thunder egg, so even if you collect a bunch extra thunder eggs in Bli-Bli Station Outpost, it doesn’t mean you’re any closer to completing Southern Rivers.
The game’s other main collectables are Golden Cogs. These unlock non-elemental boomerang upgrades, such as the Multirang, Zoomerang or Infrarang. Each new boomerang comes with new abilities to help you, such as being able to throw 6 ‘rangs instead of 2 with the multirang. Completing the boss fights unlocks the elemental rangs.
This game was a large part of my childhood. Along with Ratchet and Clank, and Jak and Daxter, the PS2 era collectathons got me through most of my days after school when I needed to wind down after a bad day (and I was too young for my parents to let me play Hit & Run just yet.) But the reason I’ve been playing it recently is actually because this game has an Archipelago mod, which randomizes all the thunder eggs, golden cogs, boomerangs, and talismans, and I’ve mixed this into a bunch of other randomizer compatible games, such as Nine Sols, Tunic, and Outer Wilds, which has kept me going for weeks now lol.
All in all, a very good game, a very good nostalgia trip, a decent holiday to Australia, and still yet an incomprehensable story. I love it.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/411960 £10.99
Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/TY-the-Tasmanian-Tiger-HD-1757745.html £19.99
CeX: https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail/?id=5030930031909 £2.50
*EA vs Self-Published: EA published the PS2 version with Krome as the development studios. For the PC re-release, Krome was on their own.
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