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Tokyo Jungle
PlayStation Network
Rogue-yo Bungle
2/5 stars
When “Tokyo Jungle” was first revealed a few years ago, I was mildly interested in the game, but not enough to warrant a purchase. Serendipitously, “Tokyo Jungle” is included in “The Best of PlayStation Network Vol. 1,” a disc-based compilation of digital games that I purchased for access to a different game. Unfortunately, the promotional video clips for “Tokyo Jungle” scattered about the Internet do little to reveal the game’s deepest, most fundamental flaw: It is a Roguelike (you have been warned!).
Presentation
“Tokyo Jungle” is a fairly hideous game to look at. While the environments are passable and the animations for the numerous beasts that populate the game world are actually quite good, the fact that the textures used on the polygon models are so low-resolution and muddy ruins the overall experience. Every cutscene is marred by these abominable textures, which are both lacking in detail and completely covered in compression artifacts. It looks like someone took an overcompressed JPEG image from the dawn of the internet and tried to stretch it to 720p (which is the game’s native resolution).
The audio in “Tokyo Jungle” continues to inflict pain where the visuals leave off. The animal sounds emitted by the game’s denizens are passable, but the entire game is accompanied by a throbbing, grating soundtrack that I can only describe as Dubstep. It all sounds vaguely the same throughout the game and is painful to listen to.
To top off the presentational mess that is “Tokyo Jungle,” the game has a single, truly-annoying bug (at least the “Best of PSN” version): Upon starting the game every time, it forces the player to scroll through the entire EULA for PSN and accept it before beginning. Every time. Not once, the first time the player starts the game (which would make sense), but EVERY SINGLE TIME. As if sitting down to a game of “Tokyo Jungle” wasn’t painful enough, having to deal with an extra bit of tedium each time made it very difficult for me to build up the willpower to face-down that EULA and the terrible game attached to it.
Story
“Tokyo Jungle’s” story is its high point. Of course, it’s a confusing mess that is purposefully told in an out-of-order and piecemeal way, but at least it does eventually make sense.
The player begins the game thrown into an apocalyptic Tokyo, where all humans have mysteriously vanished and the city’s pets and zoo animals have escaped and established a new world order using the Law of the Jungle. The player initially must go through a tutorial mission as a Pomeranian dog before getting thrown into the Roguelike Survival Mode.
While “Tokyo Jungle” does indeed have a Story Mode consisting of 14 chapters, in order to unlock each chapter, the player is forced to dive into Survival Mode and hunt down three data discs (which look a whole lot like SD cards). Fortunately, every data disc appears at a static location and collecting them usually doesn’t require the Roguelike portion of the game to be particularly nice or fair (which it never is). Each data disc also unlocks a short snippet of story text that appears in the game’s Archive. Oddly, most of the game’s overarching ‘actual’ story is revealed only through the Archive, providing news articles, journals, and classified documents that hint at what happened to cause the world’s current, disastrous state (hint: “Tokyo Jungle” is a science fiction story, not fantasy). The Story Mode chapters themselves are point-of-view scenarios dealing with specific animals trying to eke out an existence in post-apocalyptic Tokyo. Some of these chapters tie together to create short narrative arcs for certain animals while others are one-offs.
Gameplay
“Tokyo Jungle’s” core gameplay mechanics are an unhealthy mix of a 2.5D platformer and a Roguelike RPG. The Tokyo environments the player is tasked with navigating are fixed-camera sidescrolling areas with free foreground/background movement, all while randomized events conspire to ruin the player’s day.
In the Story Mode chapters, the player is given a specific animal to play as, and lead by the nose through a short series of mandatory tasks. Failure in Story Mode is not punished with much severity at all, as each chapter includes a number of checkpoints.
The main meat and potatoes of “Tokyo Jungle” is Survival Mode. In Survivial Mode, the player is allowed to choose any animal they have unlocked. Animals can be unlocked by completing specific challenges in Survival Mode with a specific animal and paying Survival Points. All of the animals in the game are divided into two main categories: Predators and Grazers. Predators are carnivorous animals that need to kill and eat other animals to survive, while Grazers are herbivores that must seek out edible plants while avoiding Predators. All animals, regardless of category, are capable of melee attacks and ‘Clean Kill’ takedowns. On the other hand, smaller Grazers can double-jump, while large Grazers and Predators are limited to a single jump.
In Survival Mode, the player is constantly racing against two timers. One is their animal’s Hunger Meter, which slowly ticks down over time. The other is the game’s Year Meter, which slowly ticks up over time, with one game year being equivalent to a minute of real time. While struggling to find enough food, the player is also tasked with completing certain randomized Challenges, with a new group of Challenges becoming available every 10 years. Whenever a new groups of Challenges becomes available, the previous group is rendered void, thus giving the player approximately 10 minutes of real time to complete 3-4 random objectives (which are all visible to the player at the start of a Survival Mode game).
Every completed Challenge provides a stat bonus to the player’s animal. Of course, these stat bonuses mean nothing if that animal dies of old age. Thus it is necessary to mark all of the flagged areas in a given territory to attract a mate. Mating resets the player animal’s age timer, provides extra lives in the form of litter mates, and permanently saves a portion of the player animal’s earned stat boosts (which will also be available upon starting a new Survival Mode run with the same animal).
This all sounds perfectly do-able, as far as surviving goes… except that the sheer amount of randomness ruins the game’s playability. How fair is it when the game randomly decides that the player animal’s current territory is polluted… and every bordering territory is ALSO polluted? When an animal is in a polluted territory, their Pollution Meter starts ticking upwards toward 100, at which point they begin taking constant damage as though they were starving. The only way to reduce pollution is to eat non-polluted food… which is impossible to find in polluted areas. How fair is it when the game randomly decides the only territory with food available is on the opposite side of the world map from the player animal’s current location… and the locations of all of the current Challenges? How fair is it when it’s possible to run down a street filled with chickens, then return 2 minutes later to find it filled with lions?
Death in Survival Mode is punished in true Roguelike fashion, forcing the player to start a new playthrough from the beginning with a new set of randomized Challenges and whatever meager stat boosts they managed to attain via mating.
Overall
“Tokyo Jungle’s” low-resolution textures and grating soundtrack are an affront to the senses. Simultaneously, its forced Roguelike gameplay is an affront to the sensibilities. The piecemeal, haphazard science fiction of the story isn’t good enough to warrant suffering through this misbegotten disaster of a game.
Presentation: 2/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
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