In Tornado you'll take control of one of six unlockable animal creatures that can use a tornado machine to suck up pieces of Earth that had been stolen by some evil alien guy. There's a little bit of a plot, and most of the characters are unlocked by playing the single player game. Each section you take back is divided into levels, starting with England, moving onto France, and so on. There are little identifiable landmarks associated with each location as well, as a way to let you know where the heck you're at within the game.

The main device in the game, the tornado machine, is activated by constantly scribbling circles on the lower DS screen with the stylus, in order to bring the tornado to life. Once you do this, you can then use the stylus to point your newly formed tornado in any direction you choose, or you can opt to use the D-Pad instead. It's far easier to just do it all with the stylus, because you'll find that you need to constantly scribble in circles to power-up your tornado as you go along. Rolling the tornado over objects picks them up, and on occasion will reveal items that you'll need to finish off whatever requirement the current stage has. Each stage has a particular goal, usually in the form of collecting multiples of a certain object, which can be hidden anywhere on the map. There's a time limit for every level, and if you don't find the objects within that given amount of time, then it's game over.

At first, the game is pretty frustrating to figure out. It tells you how to form your tornado, how the level system works (there's five levels of tornado power) and how to basically pick up objects and at what level you can pick up the bigger ones. It also tells you that you need to build up the power meter on the right hand screen to keep your tornado from leveling down as you pick up bigger objects, but it's not entirely clear on how much stuff you need to pick up to level up your tornado, or even if you need to be at full power to pull off a leveling up scenario. Also, some of the requirements are pretty tedious to fulfill, especially early on. It takes your Tornado a bit to actually level all the way up, allowing you access to roll over everything, and by the time you can, chances are you've wasted a pretty good chunk of time that could have been devoted to actually finding things. Also, when stuff is obscured by buildings or other objects, it really boils down to trial and error when locating them, and you'll most likely need to restart a level a few times before getting it down pat.

And that boils down to the main difference between Katamari Damacy and Tornado, in that one of these games is actually fun to play, while the other is a bit of a chore. The time limitations and the collect-a-thons that you have to go on to unlock all the content in Tornado are pretty annoying for the most part, and in the end it's just not that fun to play. Unlocking new characters is a decent incentive, since each character has their own particular stats with strengths and weaknesses to boot, but there's not that big of a difference between how they all play that makes unlocking them seem that worthwhile in the end. One thing that Tornado does have going for it that I found to be interesting was the use of power-ups that would give your tornado different abilities for a limited time, like splitting your tornado into three smaller ones that would arc out automatically from the center and pick up random stuff. These power-ups are given out pretty generously, but they also require a certain level to be in place before you can use them, which limits their potential until you're already a couple minutes into a map.

So while I can understand what Tornado is trying to go for, I never really found it all that fun to play. The visuals are decent, even being all 3D instead of sprite work, and the music is passable along with the limited voice work, but the story doesn't do enough to excite the player or keep them interested in moving forward. There's a limited two player vs. mode with a couple different options, but even that doesn't add a lot of life to the game, and even then it's still bogged down with the time limit stuff. Basically, Tornado is a decent idea that seems to be based on great concept, but in the end it all just feels like a chore to play more than something you'd sit down and have fun with in limited bursts. You might want to give it a rental just to see if it might appeal to you, but I honestly feel like it's a game that you could entirely avoid.