Dimensional Animals is a $5 EastAsiaSoft published interconnected map action platformer featuring a cast of playable animals. While the overall concept is intuitive, the level design, clingy ledge grabbing, and “where do I go” backtracking can cause serious frustration.
Instead of switching between animals by pressing a button, like in Marsupilama 2 (which quickly becomes tedious), Dimensional Animals combines all playable animals into one auto-launcher to streamline the entire process. For example, if X is pressed, the playable character instantly changes to the dog as the dog’s special ability is teleport warping a few feet forward. When a double jump is executed, the character swaps to a duck. If climbing a wall, the player insta-changes to a cat. Having access to all abilities at once makes for a fluid gameplay experience as the game keeps up with the player.
Unfortunately, things start to fall apart around the halfway point. There are some brutal gauntlets of attrition in which the player needs to play with precise skill or be sent back several minutes to the previous checkpoint. The problem is, the control is loose, the ledge grabbing is too sticky, and there are plenty of cheaply designed stage hazards coupled with cheesy enemy placement. Also, it is far too easy to get stuck inside walls with the dog’s warping ability which causes damage. Plus, the interconnected map is separated into a few sections but their teleport warp points are confusing at best. There are several warps in each area but they are not labeled or numbered in any way, resulting in required tedious trial-and-error. It would have been much better if the Castlevania warp point mechanic was instead implemented where you can warp to any set point from any warp room.
However, the backtracking mixed with trial-and-error isn’t even the oddest part. To regain health, these playable animals need to collect handfuls of bouncing pixels that can exploded out of defeated enemies, kicked rocks, or even checkpoints. Whenever these simple rainbow-colored pixels spawn, the framerate drops to low single digits. Not only does this horribly break gameplay, it can cause the player damage or to unnecessarily fall off a ledge because the flipbook framerate becomes unplayable. These are literally just bouncing pixels too. Why does the Xbox Series X, the most powerful home console ever build, struggle to maintain a few pixels? Also, the soundtrack is very boring and meh.
Dimensional Animals has a solid foundation but feels like a game that wasn’t play tested enough, especially in the back half. Even though this is only a two-hour game, the harsh and obvious bumps along the way don’t justify the journey.
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
X/Twitter: @ZackGaz
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RATING
OUR SCORE - 5.5
5.5
SCORE
Dimensional Animals is a brief Metroidvania action platformer marred with odd technical quirks and frustrating stage design.