Recent reviews by Plasto

Super Animal Royale is a very lightweight game in many aspects.

Performance wise, it became one of the least demanding Battle Royale game you could run. And the match doesn't last long, kill time is pretty much non-existent. Plus there aren't any leaderboards, or ranked matchmaking to really put your skills to the test.

Personally though, I think the Battle Passes are lacking in challenge, as they just require you to gain XP towards unlocking the next tier of rewards.

But it's simple, it's fast, it's fun! And most importantly, it's accessible.

Love the game, I'm very fond of the interesting story and characters and the beautiful artworks the game has!
I really appreciate how you could customize the appearance of your character, their gender and pronoun too- It honestly makes the experience of the game much more enjoyable for me.

Really wish there was an ending that includes all the main characters though, in every ending it feels like I'm missing out on helping out the other characters and that's kind of a bummer d:

Best thing is though, the game is one of the only few LGBT tagged dating sim that aren't hyperbolic in general.

Fairly casual Bullet Hell game.
There's not really much in it though and it's not really challenging, even towards the end of the game. I mean, I got the achievement for beating the game before I even died 30 times, and I never played these kinds of game ever before.
Game's just simple fun and I had no issues with it whatsoever.

Despite my playtime on this account, I have actually started playing this game since Skølldir and his Honeydew skin first came out, which is somewhere in the late 2012. I've loved booting up this game every afternoon to play splitscreen with my brother. And even though we had no controller to play with, this game was amazing for us since it supported playing splitscreen even with no controllers by sharing the same laptop keyboard we had.

Since then, it's been years of me not playing the game at all. Just last year though, I re-visited this game to see how it became now that it has went free-to-play a few years ago. And to this day, lowering wearing my nostalgia glasses for good measure, I still do genuinely love this game to bits. Though, there are still a few issues with this game that I've noticed throughout the time playing ever since.

I am no expert at playing MOBA or even a simplified- more casual and 2D version of it with no concept of mana. But a lot of matches I've played on have had me notice that a few of the 34 available 'nauts in the game are just easily countered by many others and is just generally lacking in terms of skill and teamplay abilities. You can notice a few 'nauts who lacks in maximum health pool, damage and even crowd control capabilities but merely makes up in their faster movement speed and smaller hitboxes; which still would mean that they doesn't really fill the necessary role of something like an assassin as their abilities usually couldn't do much potential in neither solo or teamfights. A few 'nauts that fits this description would be Lonestar, Rocco and Max Focus among others.

Another thing is that Awesomenauts uses peer to peer for matches but lacks in playerbase. So if you're like me, a person who currently lives in South East Asia and has an internet speed of less than one mbps then be prepared for matchmaking that could take up to 18 minutes long and play in matches with an average ping of ~350. I admit that the fault is on me for still playing in such a rural area with not much players around. I can understand why Ronimo resorted to using peer-to-peer connection considering the playerbase I mentioned though, it's admiteddly a pretty clever move along with having most of their data stored on Steam's cloud server.

Other issues that I'd like to address are the lack of additional graphic settings, playable official maps, and the lack of updates this game has had in the past year or two, although understandably so.

The whole game only has only 6 official maps in total, and only 5 of them are currently available to play in matchmaking games, and this has been the case for years now. I'd honestly love it if Ronimo would just feature a map from the community workshop for the game as playing the same 5 maps every time can get really repetitive.
Available graphics settings are fine right now. Though I think the game could use even more settings to optimize peformance, such as decreasing (or disabling!) the particles that appears on character sprites at the armory.

I understand why there are lack of updates though. Even though Ronimo Games have been claimed as Netherlands' largest independent studio, in the past, it still needed support from the community through Kickstarter to make a couple significant expansions to this game; which is what Starstorm and Overdrive is. So understandably with where the world is right now, it's even harder to make more of those possible.

Now, even with all of those issues and lack of things that I've pointed out, I still do adore and love this game to this very day. Sure there is issues, just like any other game has, but there are also a lot of things that also makes Awesomenauts awesome, and I will elaborate on it further.

The soundtracks that this game has for every single playable Awesomenauts and other things are all incredible and fits perfectly. Ronimo hired a small composer team from SonicPicnic to create every single soundtracks, jingles and themes in this game and boy do their soundtrack just SLAPS. SonicPicnic is able to create a LOT of different styles of music and make it sound natural and absolutely amazing.
Something very much worth noting is that buying ultimate skins in this game not only gives you that, but you even get a totally different soundtrack to go along with it!
I highly recommend to whoever is reading this to learn more about a few of the 'nauts in the game and then proceed to go to SonicPicnic's Bandcamp page and play their theme. Seriously.

I also love how unique everything in this game is. From the main idea of having a 2D platformer-MOBA hybrid back in 2012, the distinct and memorable playable characters in the game and their backstory, their droppod mechanic, even the character upgrades icons and their silly flavor texts in the shop. And those are just a very few I listed so this doesn't go on forever though, there's so much more work of creativity in this game.

I very much love the developers and the community surrounding it too. Something that greatly reflects this is Streamisho which is something I adore too. It's a stream that the developers host every week on Twitch every wednesday, where a few of the developers would play this game and have fans catch up to what they have been up to, and also generally just to hang out with them and play together, usually showcasing the week's new brawl mode and everything else, and often with a raffle giveaway of their games and skins which goes generously for the whole stream about every 15 minutes or so.

Onto the game itself though, I believe they executed the whole idea pretty well. Even if a few of the nauts doesn't have as much potential as the others. All of them does still fill in a niche roster combination, which is where I think they were going for with a few of the nauts I mentioned before. For an obviously casual game though, I personally don't see this as a huge problem at all honestly.
Currently, I'm pretty sure that there is no definitive meta 'naut to guarantee an absolute win though. The community is pretty much still divided on a lot of different opinions in which of the playable 'nauts are 'overpowered', and that pretty much speaks for itself; game doesn't really have a huge issue with balancing.

And well, that's it! I could honestly go on for quite a while on why the game is awesome, but I don't think I would, considering what I've already written..

But yeah, I highly recommend to give it at least just a quick try. Considering the small playerbase it currently has though, it'd be better to play this if you live somewhere in the west. And if you're not somewhere in that area (like myself), then I suggest playing at a time exclusively from between the early evening to dawn in your area to have the -optimum- experience of the game's online matches and queue times. They have an official Discord server too if you're looking to play with someone else often, so there's that!

A particle emitting unusual glitter ball headcase and a stylish, fitting disco suit for a mere $1.8!
Even comes with nifty tunes you can play with your healbot, and small decaying note particles for your heal beams.

Skin is very consistent on either side of the team, so kudos for keeping the cool looks!
Not sure how the droids shoots laser beams though, considering they're now literally just mini disco balls,,

Definitely still an awesome skin though, absolutely worth every cents of the purchase!

Nailed a very simple concept of a game: thinking twice in under a second.
Literally just clicking two buttons for the entire game. Personally, the fun mainly comes from the straightforward challenge the game has: Getting a better score than the last or getting the longest streak in endless mode.

Creability did an admirable job making the game not bland by having a theme (or aesthetics) in it. The game has a theme set in the 90's which is cool and just fits well with the game; The song used, the glitch effects, TV lines, and all put in just synergizes really well.

The only issues I have with the game is the poor performance. I was actually using a notebook with a below average specification (which could play the older Source games just fine) to play this but I was surprised the FPS dropped to around 40-ish for this game.

Other than that though, the game has well designed and thought-put-in achievements. The "Finish Continent with Frequencies" are certainly not easy but is actually possible to achieve with decent dedication put in. Had fun spending a few hours getting all the non-DLC ones and am looking forward to actually getting all of them with COLDTV.
Also a bonus point: The easily achievable "Finish Continent" achievements has a really cool icon and caption!

Amazing old-school styled turn-based RPG!

The game has a great story and even better writing. It also offers a range of different playstyles that doesn't have a balance issue. Has a solid (but few) soundtrack and a solid old-school RPG aesthetic. And most of all, this one's free!

All in all, I highly recommend playing this for the people who wants to try out games of this genre. It greatly captures the essence of an RPG game in a pretty simple way.