Aniimo Review - This Free Game Shouldn't Be This Good

Chinese developers are way too cool for their own good. A year ago, we received an offer to play an F2P game early: Where Winds Meet, developed by Everstone Studio, a China-based developer. Once I loaded the game for the first time, I couldn't believe it was actually a game you could play without spending a single penny. Our official review said the game put plenty of AAA titles to shame, and it did that for zero pounds.

A year later, the exact same thing has happened all over again. This time we can thank Pawprint Studio, another China-based studio, for a game that impressed me even more. Aniimo is that game, and from the moment I picked up the controller, I struggled to find the words; I was thoroughly impressed. It's an action RPG in which you catch and bond with Aniimo, Pokémon-like creatures that are not just adorable but wrapped in gameplay so deep and satisfying that, once again, plenty of AAA titles are left looking amateurish by comparison.

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Aniimo is one more F2P game from Chinese developers that blew my mind, as Where Winds Meet wasn't enough.

Story

This is an F2P game, and that point is worth repeating as many times as it takes. When you've paid nothing for something, it's easy to forgive whatever falls a little short, so you're probably expecting the next sentence to tell you the story here isn't up to much and that this would be perfectly fine. Well, I have news for you: the story in Aniimo is excellent. Surprised? Don't be, because Aniimo is simply an outstanding game.

At the beginning of the game, you create your character. You can choose a gender, and then a detailed character creator pops up, offering several presets or the tools to build one from scratch. There's a huge range of options and sliders to tinker with, and if that's too much, the presets alone are gorgeous enough to use as they are.

Once you've named your character, the story begins. You play a talented Pathfinder who arrives at the university to study Aniimo. Soon after, the story leads you to an ancient mural featuring two extremely powerful Aniimo: Helion and Lunara. Your presence brings them to life, and one of them, whichever you choose, becomes your companion.

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The character creator in Aniimo is really impressive.

These events set the entire story in motion. I expected the story to be little more than an excuse to push the game forward, but it's far more than that. You'll meet a huge cast of characters on this journey, students and teachers alike, and each one is properly voiced. The characters are uniquely designed too, alongside an equally impressive number of Aniimo, but more on that later.

In essence, the story is a real driving force in Aniimo, which had every right not to be, and no one would have held it against the game if it weren't. I know I wouldn't have, but it holds its own remarkably well.

Gameplay

The gameplay is where Aniimo truly thrives, perhaps too much for its own good. This is a live-service game that earns its keep through microtransactions, so it's hardly surprising that the gameplay needed to be this robust.

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Microtransactions are in the very core of Aniimo's gameplay; so expect a lot of opportunities to buy stuff, if you want, of course.

In theory, Aniimo is an action-adventure RPG built around animal-catching and companionship mechanics. In practice, it's much more than that, trust me. There are daily tasks, weekly tasks, and all kinds of rewards and currencies I never bothered to fully understand, not because I was lazy, but because there was simply too much of it. To properly get your head around everything Aniimo offers, you'd need something close to a degree in the game itself. The menus are packed with options and opportunities, and I got lost in all of it, so I focused my time on what I understood best: solving quests one at a time.

Speaking of quests, they're well designed and carry real weight. There's a main questline built around solving the mystery of the powerful Aniimo and their sudden awakening, plus side quests that pop up in every area you visit.

The world is open by design. Once it becomes available, you get the whole map to explore, and from that point on nobody holds your hand. Go wherever you want and do whatever you like, but you'll need to level up before you're strong enough to operate in certain areas.

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The amount of things you can do in Aniimo, and the scale of its world, is really amazing.

Doing quests, discovering and catching new Aniimo, beating stronger ones, and exploring ancient ruins and their challenges will all give you XP, which you'll need for levelling. There are level caps you'll have to break through advanced training. Your Aniimo need levelling too, and once certain conditions are met, you can evolve them into bigger, more intimidating forms. Beyond levelling yourself and your Aniimo, you'll unlock skills for combat, traversal, and plenty of other mechanics besides.

Aniimo and companionship deserve a section of their own. The game clearly takes its inspiration from Pokémon and the joy of catching creatures we all grew up with, and the core loop is much the same. Instead of a Poké Ball, you get the so-called Aniipod, same idea, different name, which you throw at unsuspecting creatures roaming the world, and the interface shows your percentage chance of catching them.

You can craft stronger Aniipods to raise those odds in your favour, but crafting more advanced ones requires rarer, more advanced materials. In combat, you can chain together a simple combo of attacks while in human form, backed up by your selected Aniimo. If you choose to twine with your Aniimo, you play as them for that moment, which opens up more attack options, including special attacks tied to that particular Aniimo.

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Aniimo are Pokémon-like creatures you'll fall in love with from the first moment.

You can also send your Aniimo to fight alone while you stay out of the action and sneak off to catch some weakened Aniimo in the process. Each type of Aniimo also comes with abilities of its own. The Flameruff, for example, wields fire: useful against enemies weak to it in combat, and just as handy for burning away obstacles like wooden crates or vines blocking your path.

Another Aniimo can glide, and if you start falling, the game automatically switches to it to save you. Another can swim, and twining kicks in automatically the moment you hit water.

All of this is meant to be played alongside other people online, and once you find your footing, you can interact with them and take part in duels. This is the game's take on a PvP system, pitting your Aniimo against other players'. You choose up to four Aniimo, match the other player's level, and go into battle. Once all the Aniimo on one side are defeated, the battle is over. I've never been much of a fan of online PvP, but I have to admit, these battles won me over.

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Defeating bigger Aniimo is part of its gameplay repertoire.

As for microtransactions, of course there's plenty to buy in Aniimo, it is that kind of game, but if you just want to play the campaign and enjoy the adventure, everything the game gives you for free will be enough. You can buy different outfits, sure, but the game hands you plenty for free too. If you want something unique to show off, then spend money.

There's a lot to do in Aniimo, so much that you can easily lose yourself in it, and since you can play it for zero pounds, I don't see a reason not to. It's free, but it's a hefty download too. The game is more than 100 GB, so if your internet connection is slow, prepare for a long wait.

Visuals, Sounds, and Performance

Aniimo is easily one of the ten best-looking games I've ever played. Trust me, I'm not exaggerating in the slightest. This game blew my mind. Once you enter the world of Aniimo, you feel like you've jumped into the most beautiful fairy tale you could imagine. The feeling was similar to watching the Avatar movie for the first time.

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Visually, Aniimo will literally blow you away.

The place is a real paradise: impossibly green grass swaying across the fields, trees in every colour imaginable, fable-like creatures whose cuteness is dialled up to the max, huge dandelions you can hop on and ride, colours so vivid your eyes can't get enough of them. All of it feeds your senses in Aniimo. This game is embodied beauty, full stop.

The character design, packed with detail, elevates the visuals even further. From time to time, when the game zooms in on distant objects, especially during cutscenes, you can see those objects carrying poor textures, but it's a fair trade-off for the overall quality and beauty of the game. At times, the game also takes a bit longer to load textures and polygons, but I believe that will be fixed in upcoming patches.

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Some rough edges regarding sounds and performance are there, but I hope the developers will see to those sooner rather than later.

However, where the visuals thrive, the sounds stumble, and not by a small margin. The sound design in Aniimo will need a serious overhaul if it has any intention of matching the rest of the game's quality. First, credit where it's due: the voiceover is very good, and I was surprised it was there for every line of dialogue (one of my biggest complaints with Where Winds Meet). But the sounds, especially dialogue lines, tend to disappear completely from the game. One moment everything's fine; the next, all you hear is music, and then even that cuts out.

For me, sound is just as important as visuals and gameplay, if not more so. If the sound is broken, a game can drop from masterpiece to mediocre in an instant, because every part of the experience needs to work flawlessly to earn real praise. Alongside the troublesome sound, performance glitches too, at least on the Xbox Series X, where I played both the pre-release build and the official release.

The game crashes more than a few times. Sometimes the whole world refuses to load for more than ten seconds, and while the game holds a steady 60 FPS on this console most of the time, significant frame drops become more frequent during demanding moments. Every time you catch a new Aniimo and its image appears on screen, the frame rate drops to a crawl for a couple of seconds, but I believe this will be targeted in upcoming patches.

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Try Aniimo; it's free after all, and you have nothing to lose.

Conclusion

Aniimo does something I didn't think a free-to-play game could pull off twice in two years: it made me forget I hadn't paid for it. Between a story I wasn't expecting to care about, an open world I could have wandered for days, and a cast of creatures I got attached to faster than I'd like to admit, this is a game that earns every comparison to the AAA space it keeps getting held up against. Pawprint Studio, much like Everstone Studio before it, has proven that Chinese developers are currently operating on a different level when it comes to giving players something substantial for nothing.

None of that excuses the sound design, though, and I won't pretend it does. Dialogue vanishing mid-scene and music cutting out entirely are the kind of problems that shouldn't exist in a game this polished everywhere else, and the performance hiccups on Xbox Series X only add to the sense that Aniimo needed a few more months in the oven on the technical side. If Pawprint sorts that out in the coming patches, and I have no reason to think it won't, there will be very little left to hold against it.

As it stands, Aniimo is one of the best free-to-play games I've played, flaws included, and I'd recommend it without hesitation to anyone even remotely curious about creature-collecting RPGs.