by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Tempo Storm has just released Episode 1 of their new Cartoon Series, The Inn Crowd. Join me as we recap and review this rather interesting new concept.

Episode 1: The Fixer Upper

The show opens with Frodan introducing the Inn Crowd to the new  “4 bedroom, 3 stories” Tempo Storm Hearthstone House. Sadly, the outside of the house seems to be in a rather awful state. But while Gaara, Reynad, and Hyped, all look a bit bummed out about the new place; Frodan is very optimistic, claiming that it only needs a little clean-up. Entering the building does nothing to quell their doubts, as things look even worse indoors. Gaara is shown recording the happenings on a handheld camera, and he’s all doom and gloom about the situation. With all the evidence at hand, Frodan is forced to admit that maybe the house is a bit “rough around the edges”.

The Hearthstone Cringe Humor takes over when Reynad and Hyped emphasize how awful the “deck” of the house is.  Frodan continues to try and rally the team to fix-up the house, but Gaara, who seems strangely well versed in mold and fungus, thinks the house is beyond repair and it will probably be the death of them.  Meanwhile, Hyped is about to puke, and Reynad has had enough and is going to look for an hotel instead. Reynad’s exit is cut-off by a spider spawning, and Hyped shows his Rogue prowess  by immediately striking it down. It appears that attacking that spider wasn’t the right play though, as plenty more spiders start spawning everywhere. Hyped’s blade flurry manages to buy them some time, but the Inn Crowd is  quickly overwhelmed by a full on Nerubian assault.

Oh well, at least Gaara’s recording will help the cops identify their bodies.

Flavor Text:

• The show starts with a rather typical opening sequence showing-off the characters, my first reaction was that I really couldn’t tell who everyone was supposed to be. I’m pretty sure I’d recognize Reynad, Gaara, Hyped, and Frodan if I saw pictures of them, but my first reaction to the cartoon drawings was “who are these guys?”

• I immediately identified the characters by their voices though, and once I knew who they were the drawings all started to make more sense in my head.

• Speaking about the voice acting: The mic quality from the recordings seemed to be all over the place, and the mixing wasn’t that good either. At times  I couldn’t really understand what they were saying.

• At least the YouTube video has a closed captioning option available, I strongly recommend you turn that on.

• While I can’t deny that the show wasn’t all that great from a technical standpoint, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Sure, the humor was cringy and the production values were subpar, but doesn’t that define the Hearthstone eSports scene?

• Clocking at a little over 2 minutes, this episode was pretty short. Everything felt a bit rushed and I think that the final product would’ve been much stronger if they had worked more on their pacing.

Episode Ranking:

As a standalone animated short, the Inn Crowd is nothing to write home about. But as Hearthstone content, it is certainly a welcome addition. I tip my hat to Reynad and the Tempo Storm crew for trying something innovative, and I really hope that the overall quality of the series will see a marked improvement over time.

Even considering all my excitement about the potential of this series, I can’t objectively rank Episode One too high. For now they’ll have to be happy with a ranking of Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

What did you all think of the debut episode? Let me know using the comment section below.