Rarely does a game make me question the reason for its very existence. Often times, the objective is clear enough. A game might want to tell a story, to thrill the player and test their reflexes, or even to just make a lot of money by capitalizing on a particular trend. But with Tempo ($1.99), I just cannot for the life of me conceive just why does this game exist? Who thought this game was a valid idea that should exist? It’s not a bad idea, but it’s the video game equivalent of building a bridge in the middle of a field. Sure, it can be a structurally sound and beautiful bridge, but what exactly was the point of building it in the first place?
Why do I ask this about Tempo? Well, because it’s a military-action game that distills down all the intense action and suspense of shooters where you’re trying to rescue people, defuse bombs, and slaughter all manner of terrorists in to quick-time events. Normally, quick-time events serve as disruptions, ways for game designers to try add parts to games that they couldn’t squeeze in to the core gameplay. Most often, they serve as rude distractions to the experience, an annoying compromise between gameplay and exposition. It feels unrewarding to watch someone defuse a bomb, so why not have the player press a button to do so instead? Rarely are quick-time events the most memorable parts of games. I recommend reading Tim Rogers’ analysis of quick-time events for more on what they are. Don’t worry, unlike many of the pieces by the loquacious writer-turned-developer, you can read this in less than a year!
So, who thought that Tempo should be a game all about quick-time events? Because they make a game that should be intense and suspenseful have no excitement whatsoever. Literally everything in Tempo is done by either timing the moving of a line in a circle, or rapidly tapping, or drawing a sequence in quick order. Every interaction in the game is one of those three things. You play in short 30-60 missions, trying to beat the clock by getting ‘perfects’ on each event to increase the time on the clock, as failure generally means that you’ll fail the mission. You don’t explicitly fail unless you fail twice, but the clock will run out if you screw up once. But that’s the entire game.
Judged on its own merits, Tempo isn’t terrible. The missions are short, so the game’s great for pick-up-and-play sessions. I like that the gold medal times on each mission are legitimately difficult to get, though you often just need to wait until your cast of characters have improved-enough stats to go back to the missions and get additional time boosts to earn those golds. The game does look good, though it’s definitely “generic military shooter" and needs actual iPhone 6 Plus optimization. At least there’s a diverse cast of characters, it’s not just a variety of slightly-different bros.
It feels like Tempo was meant to be a free-to-play game once, that was eventually shifted to be a paid game. There are boosts to buy, but they can all be bought through in-game currency, of which there is only one. The cash booster isn’t really worth buying as it’s a risk and for a huge part of the game, is difficult to profit off of. But the other items can come in handy, especially the additional time boost. The additional miss? Not so much. You can’t buy upgrades, you have to earn them by playing the game and completing more levels, which is something I at least respect. It feels like the game was really meant at one point to be free-to-play, then someone realized that it wasn’t going to make any money, and they decided to cut their losses by making a paid game. It was a smart decision, I think that it wouldn’t make much money as a free-to-play game. And while I can only really play so much at a time, I have the willpower to stop playing a game if I don’t want to play it any more.
So, Tempo is an okay game on its own merits, judged on what it is trying to be. But those merits are not what a game should be aspiring to be. Why does a game that strips out all the fun parts of action games, the action, is replacing them with boring, disconnected events? This is even a problem in Tempo – you’re watching a lot of the game, and the only reason why something is handled automatically and something is of your doing is because the game decided it would be that way. This isn’t a game where you handle all your actions through a system of command recognitions, this is a game where you do as someone else prompts you to do. There’s a very limited internal logic going on here.
Tempo is a game where you basically just watch most of the action and then provide the most cursory of responses to keep it going. I might have just described a Telltale game, you might say, but not so much. Telltale games focus on telling an engaging narrative, and letting the player influence the story through their decisions. They do provide quick-time events to justify fast-paced sequences as more than just action parts, but they’re forgiven because, again, it’s in service of a larger, well-written narrative. Tempo can’t fall back on that. Its story is an unremarkable military scenario. The most personality it has are the British accents.
Who is this game for? Is it for the person who enjoys action games but has no skill to play them at all? Maybe? I would suggest that they watch a movie instead. If you have limited skill, then play Midnight Star (Free) instead, that game does a smart job in limiting the action down to being just a shooting gallery. I think it’s stylistically the equivalent of one of those fake games that appear in TV shows and movies, but at least you actually do something in it! There’s a fine line between simplifying an action game and reducing it down to an absolutely pointless and inessential nothing.
And that’s what Tempo is: pointless. It aspires only for pointlessness and reaches those shallow goals. For what it is on its own merits, Tempo isn’t awful, but what’s the point of playing it? If you want a military-action game, go play Modern Combat 5 (Free), at least it will test your skill. Even if you’re not good at first-person shooters, you have to learn somehow! Please, do something besides play Tempo! Again, not because Tempo as a product is bad, but it’s a stupid game that should not exist.
