TOKYO JUNGLE Reviews

Original: Tokyo Jungle review on Gamin' Girl



In Tokyo Jungle, only the law of the jungle reigns. Survive for as long as you can, both as carnivore and herbivore, but beware; the next big predator can be around the corner!

While the game mostly focuses on a sandbox style type of game where you get a bunch of challenges to do, there’s a story mode as well. But alas, that mode is very slowly being unlocked as you progress in the Survival mode, so I haven’t been able to get very far in the story mode. You are playing as a Pomeranian (small dog) that has been abandoned as the human race has suddenly been extinct or left earth (the story unveils as you collect archives), and now you have to figure out how to survive, as there’s no one to feed you anymore.



I played the Survival mode to a great extent as I was going for completing all the challenges as a Pomeranian (first animal on the list, though you unlock the animals rather randomly), but either I ran out of time or run into one big predator or a group of them – or tried to take down a big animal who took up the fight and won. You get the challenges in groups, and those consist of one challenge that tells you where to go (sometimes it said “defeat the X boss in X” other times it just said “head for X”), followed by two or three things to do, like defeat a set number of animals, eat a set number of calories, or take over a territory by interacting with the marking points.

The survival guide
To survive you have to eat, fight and pass on your genes to the next generation. Hunger is a big part of the game, so keep that bar above zero, or you’ll start to lose health. Avoid to eat rotten or poisonous meat or plants as you might fill your hunger bar, but your poison intake will increase – at other times your poison percentage will also increase because of heat or pollution. If that hits 100, it’s a game over. That is, if you’re alone; if you are in a pack (brothers and sisters from your last mating) the controls will pass on to the next in the pack and you can keep playing.



With a wide variety in animals (from small dogs over boars to zebra’s, even raptors and mammoths) there’s absolutely plenty of options to play for many hours. This games weakness is repetition, even though some animals are stronger than others – and then it boggles me why the developers chose to have a very small dog as the first character; it makes it harder to survive thus increasing the difficulty.

The game is fun and challenging, but I think the developers made the wrong decision of making the survival mode the main thing (the first option in the menu, not to mention that much of the story isn't even available if you don’t play the survival), but that’s just what I prefer. So far I've been enjoying running in the streets of a deserted Tokyo, trying to survive, and not really do it very well. The AI and graphics isn't something to write home about, but the game keeps a certain quality of fun and challenge for the player.