Angry Alligator (PS4)
More and more there seem to be games based around the simple idea of letting you be an animal in a 3D open space, some exaggerated elements thrown in to give the game a greater appeal then a simple dry simulation of their daily life. I have already taken a look at Bee Simulator and Maneater, and when I saw Angry Alligator it looked very much cut from the same cloth, a game about going wild as a gator with little breaks from realism to better embrace the fantasy instead of the mundane reality of being such a creature. After playing it though I’d hesitate to put it in the same category, its goals certainly similar but its handling of the concept not quite as creative.
Angry Alligator begins with the player picking a baby gator to play through the game’s somewhat hands-off story. While some of the options give you more intense and fantastical looking versions like an alligator whose scales look like hardened magma, they do ultimately play the same and lack any special abilities to truly set them apart. Despite the lack of a true lava gator though, when you begin to play you learn of a story where human activities near where the baby gator lives have lead to unusual alterations to wildlife, none of it seeming to be outright mutation but the two boss creatures in the game are clearly equipped with hardware that makes them more fearsome despite its clearly harmful nature. Your little alligator has a while to go before they can start to push back against the unusual experiments though, locked in a gator farm but assisted by a gator elder named Wisecroc who helps them escape. From there the baby gator is free to explore, eat, and grow, checking in with Wisecroc from time to time to do simple missions and learning a little more about their own history by rediscovering diary entries the baby gator somehow wrote before its capture. To be fair though, you do constantly get little thought bubbles from the alligator showing what it is thinking about, the amount perhaps too abundant and repetitive even though it can at least provide useful information like how the gator reacts to a bad meal or if it is starting to get dangerously hungry.
Even before Angry Alligator sets you loose to find what interests you though you’ll start to notice some flaws in its basic design. One is definitely the game’s poor handling of the camera, it often swinging into unusual angles especially when you’re doing things as simple as scaling an incline. Rather than seeing what’s on the other side of a hill you’ll probably first get a look at your belly before it can figure things out, and while you can control the view yourself it’s not always as cooperative as you might like. Similarly, when the game begins your baby alligator is very slow, their dash giving you a brief burst of speed that drains stamina quickly. While probably somewhat accurate to the real life creature, this is also a game where you can eventually have it wear a pirate hat or a judge’s wig so speeding up the little guy to make traversing the wide open world would have been appreciated. Over time as you eat more creatures and level up, your gator will grow in size and has much more stamina that drains less quickly. There are also at least some sewer drains you can find that serve as instant teleportation points too so you don’t need to traverse the entire map to reach an area of interest.
Much of the game is focused on your alligator’s regular life activities. Its health will go down over time and must be topped off by eating wildlife, this wildlife in turn helping it grow as they play into an experience system. Depending on how big your gator is, different animals will pose different levels of danger, the baby gator needing to feast on simpler targets like turtles, crabs, and surprisingly enough scorpions until they can start trying to chase down ducks and pigs. Some larger animals do fight back, foxes, bears, and wolves willing to challenge you until you’ve become a high enough level but not really providing very interesting fights. You pack a tail smack that can be used in battle but oftentimes just chomping them with your jaws rapidly enough will take down an angry creature and provide you an instant meal, the two bosses at least a bit more involved since you need to break the hardware on them before they’re truly vulnerable. Much of the normal gameplay loop will boil down to snapping up small meals as you traverse the island environment, the water sections mostly rather empty unfortunately but the player has a few varying land-based environments to explore like mountainous areas, farms, swamps, and beaches.
Humans are set up all around the island, and while the game cautions you against engaging them, even as a baby the same snapping that works on big animals can often take down humans with very little trouble. They might kick you a bit, but they aren’t packing any actual weapons so if you do come across them there’s little risk in adding them to the menu. Sometimes when you do find them though there might be a minigame nearby, although these are so simple they barely feel like a shift from the normal play. One has you messing up the nearby area by throwing stuff around to make a mess, but rather than biting and tail smacking things you use a curious mechanic where you “grab” items, the objects floating in the air until you toss them out of the circle. One minigame has a group of outhouses you run back and forth from to eat the people using them but it is not particularly challenging since they’re so close and you can see each new victim appear quite easily. The last minigame is the simplest though and has you just tip over a basket and chomp up all the fruits that come out.
The minigames aren’t truly required and most things outside of Wisecroc’s missions are optional, but the game does at least help guide your play and make you engage with its world more by having a checklist of activities that pay out small rewards. Many goals have multiple tiers as well, so continuously eating things like rabbits and capybaras will provide you experience points at different benchmarks. This does at least make some of the moment to moment play feel a bit more meaningful, but even without this sense of purpose you will come to realize that a lot of the game isn’t putting up a fight or providing anything too engaging to do. Your travel is not really contested in any meaningful way and you often need to lean on the checklist to give you a reason to do something since areas struggle to offer anything to do besides grab a few collectibles and maybe play marginally harder versions of the flat minigames. Later in the story the game does sound like it’s building up to something, giving the player new abilities like spikes they can equip on their tail for harder hits and the ability to call in a backup gator, but their usefulness is limited and often superseded by how biting things often does the work better without wasting resources. The music that can distract humans feels particularly useless since they’re already barely a threat and some don’t even fall for it likely as part of the technical problems again, the game crashing a few times while I played and even having an odd scenario where a death lead to me unable to pick any option on the game over screen. Revival is usually quick and painless if you do starve or pick a fight when you’re not big enough to win the straightforward damage race, but when the game gets so repetitive with its unimaginative story structure, sticking through to the story’s end isn’t particularly rewarding.
THE VERDICT: A very rudimentary execution of the idea of playing as an alligator, Angry Alligator lacks the creative spark needed to make its exaggerated animal sim more exciting. The gator spends so much time needing to eat to survive but the task isn’t challenged much, the prey that does fight back either going to win because you’re not high enough level or folding easily even when you’re surprisingly young. Your extra abilities mostly feel superfluous and the missions give you little interesting to do, and while the checklist system with its steady rewards for simple tasks pushes you to stay active as you explore the open world, neither these nor what the game charitably calls minigames feel like they’re providing engaging content. Some glitches and crashes do harm the experience, but most of your time in Angry Alligator is tepid and uneventful rather than something that will make you the angry one.
And so, I give Angry Alligator for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. Maybe if the game was more demanding, Angry Alligator’s unwieldy camera and occasional crashes could really sting, but even if you do lose a little progress it’s likely you were doing the same thing you’ve been doing since the game kicks off. So much of the time is spent crawling along snapping things up in your jaws, the game toying with ideas like luring birds in by leaving your jaws open or letting you swim to catch fish but those have no more depth than the basics and so hunting down prey is just about snapping your jaws as you approach animals who can’t outrun or repel you most of the time. Some collectibles and the checklist do give some of the early play that sense of discovery as you are building your gator up into something more formidable, but the game focuses more on keeping you occupied rather than entertained. Considering the fact missions are often about going out to grab specific things and the minigames are such weak concepts though it seems like it cares less about what you’re doing and more about providing mild busywork so the player’s own fascination with living a gator life is worn away quickly as it becomes surprisingly uneventful and repetitious. A lot of the game feels half-baked, especially the fighting system, but it was briefly on a good path with the concept behind augmented animal bosses that do ask you to plan and strike differently than you do against the rather plain opposition elsewhere. It still needs a lot more creativity and danger to make these fights actually entertaining though, the biggest issue certainly being that the game relies heavily on the exploration and hunting even though it doesn’t give you too much variety within that space to make it entertaining.
Angry Alligator certainly won’t be the gator game for people looking to spend some time in that animal’s scaly shoes. The technical issues would definitely keep it from this in some ways, but the lack of true variation is what really lets the game down. A break from the reality of being an alligator is acceptable, but when it can snap its jaws and scarf down human beings with ease even when fairly tiny it’s not giving you something close to life or something interesting to embrace in the fantasy. Being an ornery alligator doesn’t need to be a rough bid for survival, but it should at least have moments that challenge you to think about what you’re doing beyond maybe hitting quotas on the checklist. While certainly in need of some programming polish, what Angry Alligator really needs is something that can get a player to feel something about the play, the action so plain you’re more likely to be left apathetic than angry or entertained.