Super Animal Royale (Switch eShop) Review

Super Animal Royale is a free-to-play, top-down, 2D, 64-player cross-play Battle Royale with premium cosmetics. It’s a lot of concepts stacked on top of one another, and it shows how our gaming vocabulary has expanded over the last decade or so. Here are notions that you would have had to spell out in detail in the early 2010s, but are now a must-have shorthand for basic gaming fundamentals. These are familiar ideas but combined in a new way and the result is a lot of fun.

If you almost stop reading free-to-play, you won’t need to count the low points in the history of that monetization strategy. There is the “play for free at first” model, the “pay to win” model, the “pay not wait” model and the “whale” concept, the problem of overspending that ensures the economic viability of a game. at your own expense. With all the psychological manipulation involved in loot betting and the in-game coin layers blurred with the real ones, it’s understandable that “F2P” has become a scary term.

However, Super Animal Royale doesn’t do anything too egregious with its monetization model. First of all, everything you pay for is completely cosmetic, so you can really play as much as you want for free and have the most fun. Second, it doesn’t go the loot box route, so discussion about the game doesn’t have to reap its head. However, it makes use of time-limited items to shake up some FOMO and allows you to speed up the collection of in-game currency by purchasing passes, which generate a pull that goes beyond a clear-headed cash exchange.

However, to Super Animal Royale’s absolute merit, its dense and intricate home screen, laden with tiny text and seemingly bottomless storefronts and unlockables, is adorned with a giant button marked “Play.” If you want to ignore everything and just play around, it’s perfectly easy to do so. The customization options will accumulate as you play, in case you want to check them out later. Creating an account will allow you to bring your characters and stats to other platforms, but that can also be bypassed with a unique option.

There are options for solo, duo, or squad play types, server locations, a lever for filling the server, and another for crossover play. After pressing Play, the pre-game “lobby” is a large outdoor space, a corner of the battle map, where you can freely run and hit other waiting players with your (customizable) melee weapon. This is a good opportunity to show off your character and gear, and see how much variety there is. In our time with the game, a 64-player server would regularly take up less than a minute, even without cross-play enabled.

The game itself is a classic battle royale. You choose your drop off point when an eagle transporter crosses an abandoned safari park, then scavenge for weapons and items before a ring of skunk gas tightens around the arena and rallies the survivors. Matches are short, usually ending in about five minutes, and of course shorter if you have a bad one. Combined with switching from one minute to start another, it’s a fantastic game to dive into and there always seems to be time for one more chance. The conviction that you will do better next time is addictive and the berserker bloodlust when the last one-on-one comes is thrilling.

The game is played as a double lever shooter like Robotron: 2084 – a retro callback that’s a cozy twist on classic games in such a modern affair. You move with the left stick and aim with the right, all in the 2D plane. Combined with a swinging maneuver, which increases speed and dodges attacks but stops your own fire, there is a sense of athletic prowess that feels great to control. Add in the “fog of war” system, where elements and enemies are not visible unless your character has line of sight, and you have the beginnings of a very fluid tactical shooter. Tactical satisfaction increases in squad mode, where an organized team of four can coordinate to delightfully deadly effect, if you’re lucky enough to find a competent squad.

That’s perhaps the first sticking point with the Super Animal Royale proposition: the impact on the game of poor players. It’s always going to be a mixed bag with a busy new free game, but the player count in a solo game usually drops below 30 in no time, so the arena can sometimes feel too empty before it hits. Skunk gas shut off. in. The game has been balanced for a couple of years on PC, so perhaps this will be resolved after the release period on Switch and other consoles.

Our second complaint is the performance. Here, too, it’s important to have realistic expectations – out of 64 players, there are likely to be some tricky connections. However, several times we find ourselves in intolerably bad network situations right down to the end players. We found the game to be more reliable when connecting from the UK to a North American server than a European one with a much lower ping. At best, the gameplay is fluid enough to be enjoyed, although it falls short of the ideal 60 frames for a competitive action game. However, most of the time, the frame rate was not felt as a limiting factor.

With that being said, there is enough charm in the Super Animal Royale pack to get you through a weird dodgy match. Characters and cosmetics are fun, varied, and engaging, and the game world is more than functional. There are secrets, historical milestones, and traditions to uncover if you get the chance amid the frenzy of battle. The setting of an abandoned safari park is a stroke of genius and a pleasure to explore even after many, many games.

conclusion

The concept of Super Animal Royale is very now – It is based on all the familiarities of modern mainstream games. So in a way, you could say it’s cutting edge. However, in another way, everything is very familiar, to the point that it is strangely unremarkable. No individual aspect stands out, but forms an endearing whole. It feels great to play (when there’s no serious lag), the map is compelling, and the Battle Royale formula is as popular as ever. The monetization model is not straightforward and the player base is certainly there. It’s free, it’s less than a gigabyte, it’s fast, and it’s fun. Why no Download it?