Angry Alligator Switch Review: Eat, Swipe, Repeat

Angry Alligator? More like Hungry Hippo. Alright, we’re already dealing in inaccuracies here, but no matter which of the four alligators you pick for your adventure, they’re all ravenous and will consume more livestock than Crypto at a bovine convention.

There’s little plot – I’d even say there isn’t one other than finding the wise ol’ alligator of the swamp and see what its thoughts are of the invading hoomans. That trailer in my news post? 50/50 accurate. While you certainly ‘serve it to the man’ (eating them), they aren’t nearly as aggressive as your chosen beast.

If we are to shoehorn Angry Alligator, from Lion Castle Games, into one type of game, it’d be a sandbox. It’s a big open world full of cute lil’ animals (with wicked ‘rabbit in the headlight-type eyes;), but few dangers. Well, depending on the level of your alligator. The bigger they are, the tougher they are.

Angry Alligator Switch Review

The motivation of the game is the village elder and their advice, but you can do your own thing from the get-go. As someone who likes to grind, and you can interpret that however you wish, I do like to level up and overpower if there’s the flexibility to do so. In Angry Alligator, it’s a luxury as all I focused on was levelling up.

Each time you eat an animal, you get XP. For every ten levels, the alligator will evolve into a more formidable predator, able to run faster for longer periods and snap at its prey with minimal effort. And the animals here are in abundance. Perhaps the first flaw of the game.

When you start, you’ll be eating turtles and frogs – the former are fish in a barrel as they can’t outrun you like later animals as rats do. What’s the purpose of levelling up? It allows you to destroy more things – such as fences, take that extra damage, and keep up with the faster animals. As this is in your interest to pursue, all you have to do is circle or do laps in a chosen area, and the animals will respawn, enabling you to evolve.

At first, this was a bit of a shortcut, but it gets boring, so it’s worth exploring the map (with no North-facing compass) as this awards XP. You can also locate mini-games and destroy the humans. More on the mini-games in a mo, but exploration is encouraged as you’ll find harder animals that give lots of XP. Bears, for example. But note that if you haven’t levelled up appropriately, they’ll wipe the floor with you.

SnapShot

It became apparent that I was free to do whatever I wanted in Angry Alligator, and I was cool with that. As stated, I opted to level up as swiftly as possible, but when it became apparent that customisation was on offer, that was enough to whet my appetite further. Granted, it’s all cosmetic, but donning a wig like the crocs in Kissyfur (remember that?!!) or a mohawk, gave me something to live for before being turned into a belt.

But the longer you spend on levelling up, the bigger the appetite of the alligator and the constant feeding. Progress starts to slow down, and the only motivation for eating is for the hunger pains, and your health will continually drop as you move. So you begin to look for other things to do.

This is where the mini-games come in. They seem more focussed on family audiences (despite eating people) as you have to collect so much fruit before the time runs out, or each as many people taking a dump before they’ve wiped and flush. Fear not, it’s all tasteful, despite the context.

Load Up The Ol’ Alligator Skins

But this is where Angry Alligator loses steam, and it becomes apparent that this is only just a sandbox. I’m OK with that as I found it quite fun to chill with minimal difficulty other than human drones that gun you down if you can’t find a place to hide. The activities do dry out, and the game then resorts to a treasure hunt to find the elder’s possessions and diary entries – occasionally coming across items that are ‘locked’ until you locate other gear/level up.

I enjoyed my time with the game, as did my family, but I did note a few technical flaws. The first was the loading time. As a ZX Spectrum veteran, I have the patience of a saint, but it takes the game over a minute to load each time. That’s nothing, but if you count to over 60 with a four-year-old, it may as well be a day. Besides loading times, there’s a lot of friction with movement.

The alligators in Angry Aligator can walk over anything, and swim too. Almost vertical pathways can be ascended (unless in the water) with relative ease but walking in general features plenty of intermittent invisible walls where you’ll be walking on a flat, then the alligator starts walking backwards. This happened far too much, and in areas where there were no obstacles. When hunting prey, this can be a pain as you’re trying to chase down an animal and then end up backtracking. What’s that about?

An Alligator In Pyjamas

Angry Alligator is a well-presented game suitable for families and grown-ups (by law) to enjoy in their pyjamas while the kids watch some crappy Netflix show. It’s an undemanding game with somewhat immediate rewards with levelling up, multiple challenges (eating X number of animals), and hidden objects.