Well, I'm bored, felt like writing something that isn't the webcomic I do, and decided to make use of this nifty little blog feature, so here's a review for a game that I've been playing a lot of recently, Tokyo Jungle for the PS3.
Tokyo Jungle is a fairly unique and quirky brand of survival game on PSN. In it, all of humanity has vanished off the face of the Earth. All former pets have gone feral and have begun hunting for prey, all the exotic creatures have escaped from the zoo, and, for some odd reason explained in the story, dinosaurs are back. And Saber-Toothed Tigers. And Woolly Mammoths.
The main mode of the game is survival mode, which is required in order to unlock the individual chapters of the story mode. Within the game, your animal has a hunger meter that must be kept full by eating. What you eat obviously depends on if you chose a carnivore or a herbivore. Canivores must violently rip out the throats of other animals and eat them, and herbivores must run around and eat plants while avoiding combat if they can. The player starts off with two animals to choose from; The Pomeranian and the Axis Deer. Two very weak creatures. You'll have to complete challenges and perform well in order to unlock more animals, which will get progressively more powerful.
In the Tokyo Jungle, you'll face a variety of challenges aside from keeping yourself well fed. You'll need to procreate.Taking over territories is a requirement in order to get in on with the females of your species. Depending on how many calories of food you've eaten, you can either find a desperate whore animal covered with fleas who will only give you two or three kids, an average one with four or more depending on the species, and the high-class ladies who'll give you 5+ kids. Once you have kids, you take control of them, any stat bonuses you earned will partially carry over to the new generation, and any additional children aside from the one you're controlling act as extra lives.
One of the single best aspects about this game is the sheer number of animals that you can choose from. Dogs. Cats. Lions, tigers and bears. A chimpanzee. Elephants, Mammoths, Veliciraptors. Robot dogs, too. There are some issues, though. A few animals feel rather samey, such as the Wolf and the Hyena, and you'll have to play as multiple samey animals in a row if you want to get to the really juicy stuff. There's also a few animals that I found to be simply not fun to play as. The Elephant was a pain. As a herbivore, he obviously has to eat plants in order to survive. The problem is that the Elephant does EVERYTHING slowly. It takes forever to get from one district of the map to another, and when he eats, he takes his sweet ass time to take a bite out of the plants. He's strong and can take out most of the predators that will try and kill it, but that's not worth playing as a slow, slow creature like an Elephant. However, I found out later that if you crouch and eat at the same time, you'll eat much faster, so doing that with the Elephant is advisable.
There's also the problem that some of the coolest animals either take a long time to unlock through survival mode or are locked away via DLC. However, for $9.99, I'd say the big DLC pack is worth it, as it give you loads of animals, including a Crocodile, Kangaroo, Giraffe, Homo Erectus, a even a Japanese office worker. In addition to this, there's PSN avatars, a theme, and in-game items that provide stat bonuses.
The game counts how many years you maintain life, with 1 in-game year being about a minute. As the years go by, the other animals you encounter will become more and more dangerous, with year 70 mostly spawning packs of lions and dinosaurs. I found the challenge level of this game to be very refreshing. Even as something really badass like a Panther, there's still the risk that you can get ganged up on by Simba and his pride of lions. At year 100, though, the game goes out of its way to completely screw you over. Food becomes incredibly scarce, there’s poisonous fog almost everywhere, and there are suddenly large packs of Homo Erectus everywhere. These guys will fuck you up, and even if you manage to beat them, you can’t eat them. And if you take over an area, good luck procreating, because all the females that spawn are high class, and there's no way you'll have eaten enough for them to let you go doggy style on them.
However, despite its flaws and lack of online multiplayer (You can still do co-op with a friend, though), Tokyo Jungle is an addicting game. The actual map never changes, but the challenges do, and the sheer amount of animals available to the player is pretty sweet. Overall, I'd give it an 7/10. It's repetitive, yes, but at the same time it's addicting and the concept of urban animal survival is completely new.
What if humanity had vanished? Well, this is what Japan thinks would happen...
Tokyo Jungle is a fairly unique and quirky brand of survival game on PSN. In it, all of humanity has vanished off the face of the Earth. All former pets have gone feral and have begun hunting for prey, all the exotic creatures have escaped from the zoo, and, for some odd reason explained in the story, dinosaurs are back. And Saber-Toothed Tigers. And Woolly Mammoths.
The main mode of the game is survival mode, which is required in order to unlock the individual chapters of the story mode. Within the game, your animal has a hunger meter that must be kept full by eating. What you eat obviously depends on if you chose a carnivore or a herbivore. Canivores must violently rip out the throats of other animals and eat them, and herbivores must run around and eat plants while avoiding combat if they can. The player starts off with two animals to choose from; The Pomeranian and the Axis Deer. Two very weak creatures. You'll have to complete challenges and perform well in order to unlock more animals, which will get progressively more powerful.
In the Tokyo Jungle, you'll face a variety of challenges aside from keeping yourself well fed. You'll need to procreate.Taking over territories is a requirement in order to get in on with the females of your species. Depending on how many calories of food you've eaten, you can either find a desperate whore animal covered with fleas who will only give you two or three kids, an average one with four or more depending on the species, and the high-class ladies who'll give you 5+ kids. Once you have kids, you take control of them, any stat bonuses you earned will partially carry over to the new generation, and any additional children aside from the one you're controlling act as extra lives.
One of the single best aspects about this game is the sheer number of animals that you can choose from. Dogs. Cats. Lions, tigers and bears. A chimpanzee. Elephants, Mammoths, Veliciraptors. Robot dogs, too. There are some issues, though. A few animals feel rather samey, such as the Wolf and the Hyena, and you'll have to play as multiple samey animals in a row if you want to get to the really juicy stuff. There's also a few animals that I found to be simply not fun to play as. The Elephant was a pain. As a herbivore, he obviously has to eat plants in order to survive. The problem is that the Elephant does EVERYTHING slowly. It takes forever to get from one district of the map to another, and when he eats, he takes his sweet ass time to take a bite out of the plants. He's strong and can take out most of the predators that will try and kill it, but that's not worth playing as a slow, slow creature like an Elephant. However, I found out later that if you crouch and eat at the same time, you'll eat much faster, so doing that with the Elephant is advisable.
There's also the problem that some of the coolest animals either take a long time to unlock through survival mode or are locked away via DLC. However, for $9.99, I'd say the big DLC pack is worth it, as it give you loads of animals, including a Crocodile, Kangaroo, Giraffe, Homo Erectus, a even a Japanese office worker. In addition to this, there's PSN avatars, a theme, and in-game items that provide stat bonuses.
And yes, one of those items is an Ape Escape monkey helmet you can put on the Chimpanzee.
The game counts how many years you maintain life, with 1 in-game year being about a minute. As the years go by, the other animals you encounter will become more and more dangerous, with year 70 mostly spawning packs of lions and dinosaurs. I found the challenge level of this game to be very refreshing. Even as something really badass like a Panther, there's still the risk that you can get ganged up on by Simba and his pride of lions. At year 100, though, the game goes out of its way to completely screw you over. Food becomes incredibly scarce, there’s poisonous fog almost everywhere, and there are suddenly large packs of Homo Erectus everywhere. These guys will fuck you up, and even if you manage to beat them, you can’t eat them. And if you take over an area, good luck procreating, because all the females that spawn are high class, and there's no way you'll have eaten enough for them to let you go doggy style on them.
However, despite its flaws and lack of online multiplayer (You can still do co-op with a friend, though), Tokyo Jungle is an addicting game. The actual map never changes, but the challenges do, and the sheer amount of animals available to the player is pretty sweet. Overall, I'd give it an 7/10. It's repetitive, yes, but at the same time it's addicting and the concept of urban animal survival is completely new.