Review: Animal Battle
Fast-paced puzzler with MFi controller support
Puzzle games seem like an odd genre for controller support. Despite this, the newly released Animal Battle shows that much can be gained from physical controls.
Animal Battle plays like a mix of Dr. Mario and the Bust-A-Move games. Your goal here is to send groups of two colored blocks at a steadily increasing pile blocks at the top of the screen, using special star blocks to destroy all adjacent blocks of the same color.
The goal is to destroy more blocks than you end up piling up, while outlasting an opponent who’s attempting the same thing in the screen next to you. Particularly well-executed moves send debris blocks to your opponent’s screen, further complicating their job.
For an iOS puzzle game, this competition mechanic manages to turn Animal Battle into a surprisingly tense and cutthroat experience, with careful strategy of tile stacking needing to be weighed against acting faster than your opponent. It works well in practice, and benefits greatly from the tactile response of hardware controls.
Animal Battle has a few issues with analog stick sensitivity and slightly lower-than-ideal resolution, but those don’t interfere with the experience. Fans of arcade puzzle games don’t have a huge amount of choices if they want to play on iOS with a controller. The good news is, Animal Battle doesn’t merely “win by default” – this is a fun, challenging game that will appeal to fans of the genre.
People more interested in casual match-three puzzlers will probably be overwhelmed by the difficulty of an old-school arcade puzzler like this, but for fans of classic arcade puzzlers like Bust A Move or Dr Mario, this is an easy recommendation.