#Super animal royale xbox for free#

Combined with a jumping roll manoeuvre, which boosts speed and dodges attacks but pauses your own fire, there’s a sense of athletic dexterity that feels cool to control. You move with the left stick and aim with the right, all on the 2D plane. The game plays as a twin-stick shooter like Robotron: 2084 – a retro callback that’s a welcoming dash of classic gaming in such a modern affair. The conviction that you’ll do better next time is addictive and the berserker bloodlust as the ultimate one-on-one arrives is a thrill. Combined with the one-minute turnaround to start another, it’s a fantastic game to dip into and there always seems to be time for one more go. Matches are short, usually wrapping up in close to five minutes, and of course shorter if you have a bad one. You choose your drop point as an eagle transporter crosses an abandoned safari park, then you scrabble for weapons and items before a ring of skunk gas tightens around the arena and draws survivors together. The play itself is classic battle royale. Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) In our time with the game, a 64-player server would regularly fill in under a minute, even without crossplay enabled. This is a good chance to show off your character and kit, and see just how much variety is out there. After hitting play, the pre-game “lobby” is a large outdoor space – a corner of the battle map – where you can run around and freely whack other waiting players with your (customisable) melee weapon. There are options for solo, duo or squad game types, server locations, a toggle to fill the server and another for crossplay. Creating an account will let you carry your characters and stats to other platforms but that is also skippable with a one-time choice. Customisation options will accrue as you play, should you want to see them later. If you want to ignore everything and just play the game, it’s perfectly easy to do so. To Super Animal Royale’s absolute credit, though, its dense and intricate home screen, laden with tiny text and seemingly bottomless shopfronts and unlockables, is adorned with one giant button marked “Play”. Nevertheless, it does make use of time-limited items to stir up some FOMO and it lets you accelerate in-game currency collection by purchasing passes, both of which generate a pull that goes beyond a clearheaded exchange of cash for goodies. Second, it doesn’t go down the loot box route, so that gambling discussion needn’t rear its head.

#Super animal royale xbox for free#

First of all, the payable stuff is all completely cosmetic, so you can genuinely play as much as you want for free and have all the fun of the gameplay. However, Super Animal Royale doesn’t do anything too egregious with its monetisation model. With all the psychological manipulation involved in loot box gambling and layered in-game currencies blurring with real ones, it’s understandable that “F2P” has become a scary term.

There’s the “free-to-play-at-first” model, the “pay-to-win” model, the “pay-not-to-wait” model and the concept of the “whale” – the problem overspender who ensures a game’s economic viability at the expense of their own. If you nearly stopped reading at “free-to-play” then you won’t need telling about the low points in the history of that monetisation strategy. These are familiar ideas but combined in a new way and the result is tons of fun. There are notions here that you would have had to explain in detail in the early 2010s but which are now indispensable shorthand for core gaming fundamentals. That’s a lot of concepts piled up on top of each other – and it shows how our gaming vocabulary has expanded over the last decade or so.

Super Animal Royale is an animal-based, free-to-play, 2D, top-down, 64-player, crossplay battle royale with premium cosmetics.