Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 4: Bush Rescue Returns (Switch) review "In the end, it's a Ty game..."

Developed by Krome Studios, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 4: Bush Rescue Returns on Nintendo Switch is a port of a 2015 PC release. That game continued a 2D platformer series that hadn’t been heard from since Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan arrived on PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, PC, and Game Boy Advance in 2005. The series actually dates all the way back to 2002 and (for better and for worse) it often feels like it.

In Ty 4, you play as the eponymous Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. He lives in the Australian wilderness with an assortment of creatures such as koala bears and sharks. There’s an overarching plot, which revolves around the return of Boss Cass, a maniacal bird that wants to cause trouble for the peaceful residents. I suspect long-time fans will be pleased to see familiar heroes and villains represented here, but this is my first time playing a Ty game. The characters needed to establish themselves as memorable and, despite some pretty good voice acting and a few animated storyboard sequences, that didn’t really happen.



Narratively, the problem is that the scenes don’t feel connected. Levels bleed together and occasionally you go back to a menu for no apparent reason. When you resume, you learn that someone else is in trouble and needs to be rescued. There’s not enough context to build interest, so the gameplay loop winds up feeling like you’re just completing a bunch of chores and (at the end) defeating a boss before the credits roll.

I don’t tend to care much about story when I’m playing an old school platformer, so the game’s lackluster performance in that regard didn’t bother me a whole lot. However, there were a few other rough spots that did irritate me.

My first issue is that Ty sometimes feels a bit… slippery. This doesn’t come up a lot, but there are moments when it gets on a person’s nerves. For the most part, he runs around fairly quickly and changes directions and such without issue, just the way you might expect. He’s capable of throwing a few boomerangs in rapid succession, and aiming above or below him to take out enemies at angles. That’s neat. However, he sometimes must carefully leap between moving platforms. Along the edge of ledges and especially those moving platforms, he sometimes slips off or just barely fails to grab something, which bugged me.



Levels are designed in a way that makes this slight issue feel more impactful. Sometimes, you have to wait for a moving platform to slowly glide your way so you can jump on it. Then, you might have to jump along a series of platforms that crumble and fall almost the minute you touch them. To add to all of this, enemies might dive bomb you. They even attack from off-screen, occasionally firing projectiles you can’t see coming until they force you to restart a segment.

The game is generous with its checkpoint placement, which mitigates the issue to a certain extent, but it’s still frustrating when you have to stand around waiting after taking a fall that doesn’t feel like it was really your fault. In other cases, you might start from a checkpoint and take some damage from an enemy you had no way to avoid. It’s hard to describe in a way that makes sense, because not a lot of games work that way. Usually, if you die and drop back to a checkpoint, enemy positions and such reset. Here, any foes you have defeated seem to stay dead, but any that were in the middle of an attack keep right on attacking. It actually took me quite some time to defeat the first boss, because I kept spawning where enemies had killed me. They would sneak in a few hits before I could even get away to try to mount a proper attempt. It’s just weird.

Most levels have a general assignment. Then there are secondary assignments, and you can also find hidden bonus areas, and optionally collect a bunch of items. I usually like this sort of approach, but I felt no obligation to gather everything in Ty 4. I was already exploring the levels pretty thoroughly to (for example) light several beacons, or piece together broken pipes, or kill a certain number of sharks.

As I mentioned, Ty attacks with a boomerang. This isn’t just a single weapon. You start with a wooden one, but you can add alternatives. You soon access a fire-based one, an ice-based one, an electrical one, and so forth. Some additional varieties come automatically, as you advance through the campaign, plus you can spend your in-game currency to add others to the mix. Stages are built so that you need to use the different types of boomerang to progress. For instance, you might come upon an ice wall and need to switch to your fire boomerang to melt it. Or, you might find an enemy you can’t defeat unless you use the electrical boomerang. Unfortunately, switching isn’t intuitive. You can’t simply tap a button to cycle through the available options. Instead, you have to access the menu, then cycle through them and finally resume. This process feels tedious when you have to switch back and forth a few times within perhaps 15 or 20 seconds of play.



To break up the action, there are the aforementioned bonus areas and you sometimes get to play what amount to mini-games, which you can also access from the main menu. Sometimes, you’ll need to race through a segment of stage, passing through rings to manage the best possible time. Or you’ll have to skydive through a vertical course. Rarely during the campaign, you also have to do something unusual like ride a shark through the water, or chase someone while astride a large critter. These moments don’t come along often, but they are welcome diversions.

Aside from a few unfortunate moments, Ty 4 is a very easy platformer. It should appeal to younger gamers, especially if they have time to dig through every level and find all the secrets. There’s some clever design here and there, but a lot of the stages felt too big for my liking. Sometimes, I would get a bit lost and wander in circles. Once, I had to restart a level because the game wanted me to perform a task but I couldn’t find a way to backtrack and tend to a missed objective. It all feels a bit uneven, though the visuals are pretty solid overall. It’s also a short campaign, lasting maybe 4 or 5 hours unless you really dig and collect every possible thing.

Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 4: Bush Rescue Returns does nothing especially wrong, and it offers a generally pleasant reminder of the days when 2D platformers were a dime a dozen. Somehow, that just doesn’t feel like enough in 2023. If you have lingering affection for the series and its cast, check out this revived revival and you’ll probably enjoy yourself. Otherwise, Ty’s fairly mediocre return is one a lot of gamers have little reason to notice.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (September 26, 2023) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.