Animal Village

Animal Village is a top down shooter created with Game Maker. The game has great graphics, but the game play is just sort of mediocre. In essence you'll feel like you're doing the same thing, just in different areas.

The game uses custom graphics that are mostly suited to a horror / zombie shooter game. The sprites and tiles a very well done. You'll encounter many interesting looking monsters and NPCs on your journey. Your surroundings are dark and only lit by a flashlight that surrounds the actor. Chairs are flipped over, doors are broken, and blood stains litter the ground. In all the graphics are pretty top notch for this genre.



The game has a few sound effects. The most notable is the foot step sound that you'll make everywhere you walk. There are a couple of other nice sound effects, but the game could have definitely used some background music. You can see the environment, but you sort of get no feeling for it. And the boss battles were sort of anti climatic without some sort of theme for them.

The biggest part of this game is the game play, since for all intensive purposes there is no real story. For the most part you'll move around your character looking for bullets and keys as you shoot enemies. If you're a RPG Maker player you'll probably want to take a couple of minutes familiarizing yourself with the controls. They aren't too difficult to pick up, but getting used to the aiming then shooting mechanic can require a bit of time to pick up. When you aim your gun the player will stop and you can then only control the direction you face. You then need to press another button to shoot. If you die you'll keep everything you had prior to entering the room you died in, including your health. You'll be warped back to the starting location and have to walk back (though there is an elevator that takes you to the different levels.)



The game gets a little repetitive. While each level has different graphics, many of the areas in each level will start to look the same. This can cause you to get a bit lost and sometimes think you have already visited an area when you haven't. And for the most part you are just walking around, stopping to aim, then shooting an enemy. You'll pick up bullets and keys. The enemies will get harder, but for the most part you'll just rinse and repeat the same actions over and over again. There is little else than shooting in this game. The bosses provide the best challenge in the game. They have certain patterns you have to watch out for and you have to be quick on your toes. Another problem I have is that when you die you continue with the health you had prior to dying. This can cause issues if you had really low health. I would prefer a system with a fixed health on re-spawn that was dependent on how far you had progressed in the game. This could help balance things out a bit.

Overall this isn't a bad game, but neither is it a deeply interesting game. It can provide some fun or something to do if you have time to kill. In all I get the feeling that it's a slightly above average game. I give this game a 3.5 / 5.