Aniimo is a new open-world RPG developed and published by Pawprint Studio. The whole premise of the game comes down to catching Aniimo’s and completing your Pokedex. I’m not new to creature-collecting games and honestly I personally think the genre peaked with Palworld. But I’ve seen the trailer for Aniimo and I had to see for myself what it is all about. After spending some time trying to catch’em all, exploring, leveling, doing events and all sorts of quests, I finally have a clear picture. Here’s my honest Aniimo review.
Aniimo Gameplay
I’ve decided not to cover the story because honestly, I don’t know what to tell you about it without using outside information. I’ve tried to follow for a good minute, got annoyed with constant cutscenes, so I started skipping everything. Which means I have no clue what the game story is about. If you think I missed something important, let me know in the comments.
Now, moving on to the gameplay. Let’s start with character creation. The options are very limited and it’s giving you enough to make a cute little character and move on. You can spend hours tinkering with the options and you’ll still end up with a character similar to mine.
After that I’ve spent a good 45 minutes following a basic tutorial mixed with a lot of unnecessary cutscenes and conversations. Honestly, this could have been an email.
Let’s make a brief pause from negativity and talk about good stuff that this game has to offer. I like the variety of all Aniimos. What’s even more cool is that you can merge with them and fight or explore as one. It’s a unique approach that makes exploration of the world absolutely fun.
There’s also an RV system that serves as a homestead for your character that has a lot of potential if they include more options in customizing how it looks but unfortunately for now it’s just basic.
As for the combat, they’ve made it as unenjoyable as they possibly could. Most of the fight, you can just stand in one spot and watch your Aniimo fight. I mean you got no real skills or attacks, the only action that you can get is if you merge with them but it’s not as efficient, so why bother. And as long as you keep them leveled up, you’ll have no trouble at all. Just like every good Pokemon, Aniimo’s can be evolved into stronger/better looking versions of themselves. With that you get a stats boost and few new skills.
The monetization is the thing that they’ve done most right, against the popular belief. They mainly sell cosmetics but there’s also a few packs that give you a slight boost but it’s not noticeable. All of Aniimos can be obtained easily as a F2P player. So that’s pretty fair if you ask me, I don’t get all the complaints.
Aniimo Graphics and Audio
The visuals are what attracted me the most to the Aniimo. The game has a colorful open-world mixed with a beautiful and cute design of Aniimos. The world itself isn’t a huge place that takes hours to explore but there’s enough variety to keep the game becoming a monotonous snoozefest.
With that said, the game is far from being perfect. There are a lot of rough edges, with pop-in, animations that definitely need polishing and some moments where overall presentation doesn’t feel as good as one might expect. There were a couple of bugs and other miniscule issues that shouldn’t have seen the light of day.
As for music and audio, somehow they’ve managed to botch it completely. The music is good enough to make the world feel less empty and that’s as far as it goes. Nothing memorable about it. As for the other audio and voice acting, that’s where they dropped the ball even more. There were numerous times where the voice acting cut off or simply wasn’t there at all. A huge oversight on their part.
Conclusion
Even though I think Aniimo is far from a finished product that still needs a lot of real work, I guess generative AI can’t do it all. What it needs is better execution, a lot of more love and effort put into it. As for now it’s not a game that I would recommend to anyone. Also, I can’t stop you from trying it yourself. But as for now, I’m going to wait and see if any future updates happen before I play it again. What was your experience with it? Did you like it? Let me know? Okay?
