Wolf Simulator (PS4)

 Or to give it its full title, Wolf Simulator: RPG Survival Animal Battle. As you might have guessed from that "please put me in someone's search results" title, this is asset flip shovelware. But I thought there was a chance, however small, that there might be something worthwhile in that realm, maybe. Plus, action games where you play as four-legged characters are usually a nice enough novelty. I'll spoil the end of the review right here: I was wrong, and this game sucks.

 

But at least it does so in enough ways that I can fill out a review of decent length talking about them. So, the premise is that you're a wolf in the United States. Though there are a couple of buildings around, and some abandonded train tracks, there are no roads, people, vehicles, or power lines. So I guess it's set some significantly distant time in the post-human future? That would explain why there's tigers and leopards and hyenas among all the normal North American animals. Like Tokyo Jungle! Anyway, you're a wolf and you've got to kill and eat other animals, while trying not to have the same happen to you. Like Tokyo Jungle! 

 

You also get missions, though they're not as interesting or varied as the ones in Tokyo Jungle. Instead, every mission is a randomly generated quota of certain animals you hve to find and kill. I suspect that the game was originally a free-to-play mobile game, as there's experience points plus two different currencies, one of which lets you skip long cooldown times involved in one of the more pointless parts of the game. That one's the coins, a tiny amount of which will be given to you for completing missions, and there's also fangs, which are given for killing other animals. Fangs are used for increasing your stats. So what do experience points do? They eventually level you up, and every other level up, you're allowed to take part in an incredibly easy boss fight against another wolf to unlock a new area in which to run around and hunt.

 

That's pretty much the entirety of the "game" part of the game. If you really want to play as a realistic animal and hunt other animals, then Tokyo Jungle is orders of magnitude better than this in every way possible, so play that instead. But there's other stuff to talk about too! Like those coins, for example! You can use them to unlock different wolves to play as. Some of these wolves actually look really cool (though I'm 99% certain every model, texture, animation, and sound in the game was probably just bought off-the-shelf), but the coins needed to unlock them would take eons of completing missions.

 

There's also another thing in the menu that lets you use coins to buy wolf puppies, smaller versions of all the different kinds of wolf you can unlock to play as. Supposedly, these puppies can follow you round and hunt with you. However, having played through something like 70-80% of the game, it never gets any mroe difficult, and I've never felt like I've needed any assistance. But they can't join you unless you keep feeding them fangs to level them up ten times. Every time you do this, the amount of fangs for the next level increases like you might expect, but so does the amount of time you have to wait before you can do that. Unless you cancel the timer by paying a huge amount of coins. So I never got a puppy past like level three or four.

 

Wolf Simulator is awful garbage. It's insidious awful garbage, though. It's blandly engaging enough that if you were in a sufficiently deep bout of depression, I can see a person idly playing it for hours, never enjoying it, but having their brain and hands occupied enough that they don't stop, either. But you deserve to waste your time on better games than this tedious, unimaginative swill. Wolf Simulator costs about £10 normally, but I got it in a sale a while back because it was 90% off. Neither price is worth it, nor, in fact, would it be worth getting for free. Like I already said: I know the idea of being a realistic animal on the hunt in an open world will be a draw for a lot of people, and if it is, then you need to play Tokyo Jungle. No-one needs to play Wolf Simulator.