Tomato Way

The friction hits fast. Ten minutes in I was arguing with the camera, the movement had all the responsiveness of a shopping trolley with one bad wheel, and I was starting to wonder whether the joke was on me for installing a game about an angry tomato in the first place. That is the wall every new player runs into, and my honest advice is to push through it for another twenty minutes or so, because this is not trying to be good in the way that word normally gets used. It is a solo-developer fever dream that landed in December 2016, it runs roughly an hour, and the clumsiness is part of the package rather than a flaw sitting next to it. Once you stop grading it against things that had budgets and QA departments, it loosens up considerably and gets very funny. If you cannot make that mental switch, you will bounce in the first level and nothing later will change your mind. What you actually do is walk, punch and shoot your way through a run of short, mean little scenarios as a tomato with a grudge against the human race. Combat is blunt in the best way: you point at a person, you commit violence, the animation resolves somewhere in the general neighbourhood of where you were aiming, and the game carries on with total confidence that everything went to plan. Hit feedback is inconsistent, enemies occasionally do things no design document could account for, and every few minutes something falls over in a way that gets a real laugh out of the room. The humour is absurdist and proudly stupid, with no subtext to hunt for. Eighty-two percent of the 865 people who left a Steam review came away positive, which tells you the audience walked in knowing exactly what they were signing up for and got it. Now the part that matters most from my desk. This thing is filed under Racing, and I want to save a few people a download. There is no racing in any sense I would recognise. No circuits, no lap times, no handling model worth talking about, nothing that would justify clamping a wheel to your desk or reaching for pedals. If you landed here while hunting for something to add to a sim rig rotation, keep moving. On the accessibility side the story is much better. It is fully gamepad playable, the input set is simple enough that anyone who has held a controller once can work it out without a tutorial, and it runs on hardware that would fall over trying to load anything from the last decade. Low spec friendly is not a marketing line here, it is the practical reason this ends up running on someone's ageing laptop at a house party. Which brings me to how I would actually use it. My yardstick for a curio like this is whether it survives a room of four people who have had a couple of drinks, and it does, with one significant caveat: there is no split-screen and no multiplayer of any kind. This is single-player only. One person holds the pad, everyone else heckles, and you rotate the controller at each level break. That format works far better than it should, because the runtime is short enough to finish in a single evening, the setpieces arrive quickly, and the comedy is visual and reactive rather than something anyone needs to read or follow closely. Where it disappoints is depth. There is no progression, no build variety, no difficulty curve to speak of, and no real reason to load it again once you have shown a friend the two or three moments that made you laugh hardest. Surprise is the entire engine, and surprise only fires once. Treat it as a one-night oddity that earns its place through sheer commitment to a dumb idea, rather than something that deserves a permanent slot in your library rotation, and you will come away happy. Go in expecting a racer, or a game that respects your controller inputs, and you will be annoyed inside five minutes.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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