The game is fun at first but it eventually leads to frustration with the way the controls are mapped, which causes unintentional actions that will lead to death in the more difficult platforming sequences and bosses, especially the last two zones, which can become infuriating unless you figure out how to be very precise with your stick/dpad movements.

The main problems are due to unintentionally pressing down in midair, which makes Tempo propel himself vertically downwards (butt stomp) and unintentionally pressing up + charge (uppercut). It's all too easy to jump over a bottomless pit then somehow accidentally lean your dpad or analog stick down and propel Tembo directly to his death. When you are being chased by a moving wall of death, an uppercut will all too often unintentionally come out as it's easy to lean on the up direction when charging and jumping, which will kill Tembo's momentum and lead to death as there is little margin for error in these sequences. It's exacerbated when on conveyor belts. Although less of a problem having the charge button do a dive roll in midair can also cause unintentional use of this move. The dive roll, uppercut and butt stomp should have all been mapped to another button. It would do an uppercut when Tembo is standing and the dive roll when in midair. Also in midair when combined with down it would do the butt stomp and when combined with up would do a rising uppercut (maybe even a spinning one to make it flashier). This would have helped immensely to avoid accidentally doing these moves when jumping and charging. My Retro-bit Genesis controller made it possible to beat this game but even with the good dpad I still had to be very precise with it.

Some reviews compare this to Sonic but it has very little to do with Sonic. It feels more like what an adult, overweight Spyro would control like in 2D. Tembo does not glide but he can hover for a bit to get a bit of extra distance like Spyro. Tembo has more offensive options and his water spray capability is more versatile allowing him to interact with the environment and enemies in different ways. Level designs are pretty solid and do require that you use all of Tembo's abilities. Some prisoners are hidden quite well too. The last zone can be annoying, especially the final boss but a good amount of that is due to the aforementioned control mapping issues. The game could've also used another zone of levels as it feels fairly short.

With some tweaks to the controls Tembo could be a much better and less frustrating game. There's definitely a lot of good elements here but the foundation needs to be solidified a bit more. When it works, it works really well as you feel like an unstoppable elephant bulldozer but the more difficult platforming and combat areas expose the problems with the controls.