River Tails: Stronger Together

The Good
The game opens with one of the sweetest and well done animated sequences, purely inviting you to play. It seems like you're watching a Retro Charlie Brown cartoon blended with a DreamWorks CGI film. Everything about the graphics looks as smooth and flowing as water and not just the bodies of water, but the character animation and overall textures. Even the music tunes bring out the mood and drama at a comfortable pace.

While playing the game, the dynamic camera angles pan and shift just enough to focus on the player character at just the right speed. The camera even performs well on the two player offline mode. Whether you are playing as Fynn and Furple, the character feels comfortable to control and trigger actions. The characters are never obscured thanks to transparency in the textures. And speaking of transparency, there's a lot of satisfaction to finding hidden places where you think there's a solid wall, encouraging exploration.

The Bad
While the camera motions work as they need to, the only issue is that you can't reliably try to backtrack due to fixed direction, though you won't need to for the most part. The biggest disappointment is that you absolutely must have a controller to play the game in single-play. It's kind of off-putting if you're accustomed to keyboards and definitely not off to a great start. If you are playing this by yourself, a lot of concentration is needed to work with the fish and the cat at the same time. Impractical, but not impossible.

The Bottom Line
Throughtout the years there have been great games that require Teamwork like Bugs Bunny & Taz: Time Busters, and awful ones like Cookie & Cream for Nintendo DS. This game falls into the good list. It all goes to show you that you don't need vocalised dialogue in a game, even today to bring out quality. Fans of the Crash Bandicoot series will definitely get some joy out of this one. Console players would give anything to see and play this one on their choice of platform. I guess we can only dream and play when given the chance. This is game you can definitely play to bond with your best friend.