Super Animal Royale

I’ve mentioned before how I don’t like battle royales. I find them a bit tedious as a game mode with victory being impossible to obtain and no one giving a shit unless you come second in a massive tournament. I also dislike how it’s so easy to crank out a battle royale game – just make a massive map, trickle weapons and armour on it and then throw in a bunch of players. Add some sort of cosmetic and micro-transaction system and lure players in and you’re pretty much done.

Super Animal Royale is a battle royale game that goes a little bit above most normal battle royales. I mean, for starters, it’s filled with cute little animals, all armed with guns and katanas. It’s also a top-down game with cartoony graphics, somewhat similar to older, softer Flash game art styles (especially things like Orisinal Morning Sunshine). It has a genuinely pretty cool field-of-view system, with clear lines of what you can and can’t see. Building roofs become invisible when you are near them but you can’t see inside unless it’s in your field of view. These creatures do have 360 vision almost but they can’t see past trees and things.

This game is also about 86% animal puns. So. Many. Animal. Puns.

There are also a LOT of character skins. The base ones are a tiger, a bear, a fox and a cat that looks more like Rattata than anything else, but you can unlock deer and ducks and dogs and all sorts, plus colour schemes for each one. You do this mostly by killing other players.

Super Animal Royale also has a free edition, with which you can try the game out before sinking €10 into an early access title. I really, really appreciate this because frankly I wouldn’t have touched this game at all had it not been free.

That’s insanely good for a multitude of reasons. Because Super Animal Royale does have a few problems. All four of us have had issues with loading the game and everything going non-responsive. This just seems to happen every time you load the game up for the first time and try and play the game, you get a black screen and never load into a match, but closing it and starting again seems to fix it. Sometimes.

Also, this game needs more sound tracks. While the sound effects are nice and cute, there seems to only be a handful of tracks, the main menu music and one sound effect for dancing. I had to mute the music because I got tired of it. It’s not BAD music, it’s just repetitive.

And, somewhat annoyingly, like most battle royales, it’s only kills that count. I’ve knocked down so many people but rarely get the finishing blow.

The Super Free Edition though has a huge amount of limitations. You can’t use any of the cosmetics you find at all. Not from the current fruit basket thing, not from special codes, not from anything. You also can’t add people into your squad via Steam, that’s restricted to the paid version of the game, but you can invite people from Discord if you turn on the overlay and the game-showing feature. The free version is literally just the battle royale, but any progress you make towards cosmetics IS carried over into the paid edition.

Still, I don’t really care about cosmetics. And I kinda also don’t really care about chasing that first place spot. I mean, I actually WON my first game when I got match-made with a random squad. I got two knock-downs and 2 revives. If you’re in it for the game play, there’s not much that makes Super Animal Royale stand out apart from the cute graphics and top-down style, but if you’re in it for the cosmetics, you’re spoiled for choice. I’m not really in it for either of them.

It’s a good game, but I’m kinda worn out now. Also, if I have to hear that looping menu music one more time, I might murder someone.

Still, it’s worth giving the demo a try.