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There’s clearly a SEGA Megadrive fan working on TORINTO. Each level is introduced with a ‘Green Hill Zone’ style title card, and the bosses arrive every few levels like Doc Robotnik. There’s a Golden Axe ‘Go!’ message every time you clear a screen, and the gameplay is somewhere between Rolling Thunder and Altered Beast. TORINTO is a bit of a sprint through a History of Sega museum, and there are worst places to be.
TORINTO is about the most stripped back run and gunner that you could possibly imagine. You’re a tiny knight, about 80% helmet, and your weapon is a tossed lance. We guess the lances are filed away in the helmet. You can duck down, and toss the lances from that position, and they can be thrown upwards and from a jump. It’s not a deep combat system.
Sprucing things up are some pick-ups. Grenades can be grabbed from dead enemies, and they come in a few different varieties, each overriding the last one you used. Poison, ice and explosive grenades are all on offer, but they do much the same thing: they kill what’s in front of you. Some lance power-ups also offer a short burst of increased damage.
The enemies look quite a bit like TORINTO, wearing the same saucepan helmets. They throw looping axes and lances so that you have a chance of stepping out of the way in time. A single hit will kill them in most cases. But there are heftier enemies who take a bit more punishment, like flying dragons, rock-lobbing giants (duck and nobble their ankles) and catapults (sidestep at the last minute).
Then there are the bosses, who have one, maybe two phases, and tend to throw looping projectiles or duckable projectiles – sometimes a mix of the two. They’re bargain-basement, and will take a couple of milliseconds to work out, but you will still need to pump grenades and lances into their spongey health bars before they finally go down.
As a run and gun offering, it’s way, way too sparse. You can imagine a game developer standing over a table covered in a few sprites and backgrounds, scratching their heads and wondering how they could make a game out of it. What they’ve come up with is a noble effort, but it gets tired after about the second level.
There just aren’t enough enemy types to keep things rattling along. We can count five enemies, if we’re being charitable (the bog standard unit often sits in towers, which we suppose is different). To ensure there’s a difficulty curve, TORINTO starts with only one ‘heavy’ unit per screen, but then adds two and eventually three. It definitely adds challenge, but not in a particularly satisfying way. There are enemies that demand you duck, but you can’t move when you’re ducking, so that means you’re getting impaled unless you kill those enemies first. It’s a pattern that doesn’t stretch to the hour that TORINTO wants from you.
There aren’t many thrills coming from the main character, either. TORINTO’s jump is a dumpy one, and firing when jumping is at best inconsistent, at worst it doesn’t work at all. When the latter levels are adding scaffolding and multiple platforms, you need a hero who knows their way about a jump-and-fire. TORINTO shrugs and says ‘jump-and-what?’.
Power-ups are frequent, but it’s easy to miss that you’re using them. Most enemies die after a single hit, so a super-powered lance that looks like your old lance isn’t going to get you running naked through the streets. Grenades are great, taking out hordes with a single shot, but we couldn’t tell you how one differs from another. Everything just dies. We found ourselves hoarding them for the bullet-sponge bosses, so we didn’t use them enough either.
Even allowing for the low budget, it’s hard to make excuses for TORINTO, but let’s give it a go anyway. For a single-developer game, it works. It kept us running and gunning to the end, and there was a gentle increase to the difficulty, even if that was achieved by chucking more enemies at you than the last level. It also doesn’t look terrible, pilfering from some of our fondest SEGA Megadrive memories.
If TORINTO launched back on the SEGA Megadrive, the magazines like CVG and Mean Machines would have ripped it a new one. It can barely scrape together five enemies, and offers very few ways of killing them. Bosses turn up on occasion and threaten to add some interest, but they’re mostly sponges for you to chuck lances into. Then you’re back on the same conveyor belt, just with more enemies this time.
TORINTO isn’t terrible, but it tickles the top of it. It’s too starved of enemy types, and doesn’t let you have fun with the few that are there. It’s a run and gunner that does the best with the scraps that it’s got, but ideally it wouldn’t have been working with scraps in the first place.