Animal Fight Club is an Action game in where we take control of an unassumingly mad scientist who has discovered how to splice animals together in the hopes of making mad money by throwing them into an arena. Your opponents at first will get steamrolled by your forces as they throw unmodified creatures such as zebras, geese, and coyotes into the fight. Soon enough, they too discover the secrets of splicing, turning the fight club into some kind of figurative arms race to create the ultimate creature by mixing any two animals together. Ever wanted to meld a shark’s head onto the body of a crab? Well, in this game, you finally can.
At first, you do not have much to do as you need cash to both buy new animals and meld them. So it is directly to battle. You can either chose from a completely random battle, to the story missions that will help ease you into the game and gain you some much-needed funds before it gets tricky. In the fights, you will have to take control of a single animal in your army and charge the enemy alongside them. The controls are dead simple. You attack with the spacebar and use the Q & E keys to slide out of the way of your foe’s offense. At least in theory that would be how you play it. I simply found myself trying to line up a strike with these near tank-like controls and mashing the attack button. Combat is far too simplistic, and it really makes one wish for a way to give control of all your units to the AI as your inclusion seems unnecessary, as well as getting quite dull after some time.
The unsatisfying combat wouldn’t be so pronounced an issue if it wasn’t what you will be spending the vast majority of your time doing. You get very little money for a fight, and replaying previously completed missions gains you next to nothing. There is a large amount of grinding required to start playing around with the game’s most unique feature, the splicing. Only a small selection of animals will be available for sale each day, but for extraordinary prices. Your better bet is to buy a random animal for far less at a price of five coins. Five coins may not seem like a lot, yet it is over half the amount you’d make in a fight, and its loot box style of handing out creatures ensures you are in for a lot of disappointment. That means it is back to mashing the spacebar until you either win or lose another tedious battle that you’d wish would just play itself.
Each animal has four different main stats, judging what it will be effective against. These are Fire, Air, Earth, and Water elemental affiliations that direct how much damage they give and receive against another foe. You then have your HP, which is how much damage you can take and is something larger animals tend to possess more of. This brings us to arguably the most important stat. Their weight. You have a 500kg weight limit to your army, so you really have to think about whether you want a few large animals or a ton of smaller ones. Keeping all that in mind is essential when mixing together creatures so that they complement another’s strengths and weaknesses. There is sadly no way to simply mess around with the creation system, making it pretty discouraging to waste cash on creating something just because it seems funny.
The 500kg limit is more restraining than you may imagine. You will fill it up really quickly, and that is only exacerbated by not having an idea what your spliced monster’s stats or weight will be until you create it. It is meant to get the player to constantly swap out animals depending on the situation, yet the balance of both an animal’s weight and usefulness leaves a lot to be desired. Another feature you have when editing your army is setting up a new formation or using a pre-existing one. For example, you can have a bunch of rock type animals at the front and water types in the back to face off against a foe with fire-based creatures. That is the full amount of control you will have over them. While in battle, you can only control yourself, and the AI does whatever they want, which is usually just slowly waddling right at each other.
As the missions advance, they will get more challenging and start to throw more waves at you. The way the waves, in particular, are handled ruins the balancing even more. Enemy units literally pop out of thin air at random locations, usually right in between your own forces. This can either work against or for you, depending on their elemental allegiances and how many units nearby can swarm it. That either leads to an easy fight or an unfair loss of units. All the while, you are mindlessly mashing the attack button as you have no real control over anything else. Unfortunately, just far too much is left to random factors out of your limited control to make the gameplay any fun or engaging.
If you really wanted to, there is also a multiplayer mode where you can pit your army against that of other players. It is currently a ghost town, so you will have to bring some friends along for the ride. The third and final mode is Sandbox. It lets you create an enemy army to fight against with any combination of creatures. This would be nice if you could add any animals to your own side too, but you will have to use your army from the single-player, and since these battles don’t earn you any cash, it feels like a waste of time. You may as well use the random match feature of the single-player and make some money that way. One of the positives of this title are the sometimes wacky arenas you will be fighting in and the dramatic music playing throughout a battle. The low polygon models are quite charming too, and barring the large ingame price of obtaining animals, melding your very own freaks of nature was entertaining.
Animal Fight Club was an interesting experiment with a really captivating draw, yet as an actual game, it isn’t very interesting, sadly. Every attempt to engage the player is either foiled by a far too simplistic combat system, crazy balancing issues, or a long grinding period to use the title’s main feature. It would have fared far better as some kind of wacky sandbox instead of attempting a structured and limiting experience. The pieces are there for a fun title, but their attempt at fleshing out the simple gameplay fell flat. It is a really low priced title, coming in at $4, so a lot can be forgiven as you likely will get a giggle at the weird things you create. Even with that in mind, I’m not sure I can recommend Animal Fight Club to anybody unless the idea of melding together two separate animals is that appealing to you, which is understandable. For everyone else, I’d give this title a hard pass.
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