Animal Rescuer is a gorgeous looking game about Rescuing Animals!

The gorgeous city in Animal Rescuer

Tired of all the hunting and poaching animals in RPGs just to get that sweet leather purse for your coins? What’s that, you’d rather save animals from these hunters? Well, Animal Rescuer is the right game for you!

Animal Rescuer, as its name shows, is a game about rescuing animals. That might sound a bit boring at first, especially if you are a fan of FarCry. Well, I was positively surprised as soon as I booted up the game. A nice little splash screen greets you to the game. It might not be much but small additions like these make the game look much more polished and exciting. The title screens were devoid of any audio which seemed a bit awkward but as soon as the main menu hit me, I was really surprised.

Don’t Judge a Book by it’s Cover

Suddenly, all my expectations for the game just went up! I wasn’t expecting this. I just dived straight into the game without looking through any screenshots or what not. The only screenshot I saw was the banner on the game page on Steam. It was this weird shot of all animals with the protagonist in the middle. I was underwhelmed by that banner on the steam page. But I knew I was wrong right when I entered the main menu. I’ve learned to never ever judge a book by its cover.

The UI looked kind of similar and bodged. But the overall appearance was so good that I knew I could expect something from this. So, lo and behold, I started the game. I was really surprised by how good it looks. Good looking games can always make an impact on the player’s minds. I am not the kind that wants ultra 4k realistic looking graphics with raytracing. If the game’s good, I’ll take it. But this looked good and I wasn’t expecting it to. That really changed things. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen better graphics in indie games. Usually, they are really unoptimized and barely hits 30 fps but Animal Rescuer ran a good 60 fps on my i5 with GTX 1650 on ultra. Props to the devs for optimizing it.

A Small Shortcoming

Back to the game now. The game starts with a good-looking intro scene. You are introduced to the whole premise and basic plot. However, for a game with this ambition, they could’ve hired a voice artist instead of a no-emotion text-to-speech reader read out the story. Is it too much to ask for a voice actor in an indie game? May be the dev themselves could’ve done that part and make a huge difference.

Fight Ninja Hunters with Swords

The game starts shortly after the narration and you are put into a fight with two ninja hunters. The tutorial UI design was a bit unintuitive. The combat was a buggy mess. The fight animations were cancelled midway and locking on to targets did not work that well. It took me a good 3 deaths to kill these hunters. But I guess that’s what the dev was trying to do, make the enemies hard. I feel like that because of the death screen, which looks pretty similar to Dark Souls death scene. One good thing was that even when you respawn, your enemies retain their position and damaged health bar. So, that’s good, I guess.

Animal Rescuer and Doctor? Call me a Vet.

Shortly after, you are introduced to the main gameplay style. Free animals from cages and heal them. To heal them, you’ll have to collect plants and other herbs and then use alchemy to mix together a potion and heal these creatures. There is no one-potion-for-all kind of deal. Each animal requires each kind of potion. And yeah, did I mention you can pet these animals? Yeah, you can pet them.

You can pet these animals
You can pet them! Aww

A Living Environment

Right after that, you’ll travel to different islands and explore the world, helping animals and killing hunters. I have to say, the cities look wonderful. There is a living, breathing feels to it. It is filled with animals to heal and side quests to play. You can buy fruits and vegetables, or if you are low on coin, why not try your luck in gambling? You can do that too, which I feel is pretty cool.

This piece would be incomplete if I don’t talk about the sounds. It’s just amazing! There is so much happening all around and each of that is reciprocated through sounds. I am just amazed at how much effort has gone into producing these sounds. You can hear each individual animal’s sound and given how big the collection of animals is in this game, it’s a quite impressive feat! Wonderful.

Animal Rescuer: Closing Thoughts

If you are looking for an animal-friendly gorgeous looking game with steam achievements, this is your game. You can do lots of cool things in Animal Rescuer. The cities are a sight to see. The game is really polished and the world was well designed. There are bugs and teeny-tiny annoyances but if you can overlook all that, then this is a great game to enjoy on your weekends. Give it a try.

You can get Animal Rescuer on Steam.

For more articles like these, continue reading on The Indie Game Reporter. You might be interested in our interview with Hyper Three Studios.

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