Animal Mafia Review - "An underwhelming gacha experience"

• Cute animal teammates to unlock
• Tedious combat
• Repetitive background music and environments

After AI destroys human civilisation, a new threat from beneath the waves arises. Humanity is wiped out, so it’s up to the animals to band together and protect their home from the evil sea-dwelling creatures in Animal Mafia. Recruit new animals to your cause, level up to take on tougher foes, and battle an unending wave of sharks in this gacha action experience that’s out now for mobile.

Stick to defence in Animal Mafia

After a tutorial battle, you’ll be shown a music video that explains what happened to humanity and why the land animals are fighting sea creatures. It’s cute, the first time, though, it reeks of AI. However, it will now play every time you open the app, so it gets tiresome quickly.

There is nothing too complicated here. Each round sees your courageous kitty character battling an ever-increasing number of foes emerging from the sea in bullet hell fashion. You attack automatically, so you really just control where your avatar goes. Due to the often-overwhelming number of enemies, you’ll want to stick to a defensive approach. This means being in constant motion to avoid as many attacks as you can while collecting bonus items and orbs.

Kill enough enemies, and you’ll achieve a Tension Level up. With each new tension level unlocked, you’ll have to choose one of three random battle skills to equip. Battle skills vary from summoning more henchmen to increasing HP and attack duration. Tension level ups aren’t permanent. Your tension level and battle skills will reset each time you die or start a new level.

Animal Mafia is insanely repetitive

Unfortunately, combat feels very repetitive, and the scheduled boss battles do little to alleviate boredom. Combine that with the annoying background track that manages to be even more repetitive than the gameplay itself, and it's clear Animal Mafia just isn’t that fun.

You can apply permanent level-ups outside of battle from within the team menu. Don’t just focus on levelling up your avatar; keep your team levelled up, too. Different teammates require different resources to level up. 

For instance, to upgrade your cat, you’ll need grilled fish, while Spidernox uses fried octopus, and Goatros requires steamed shrimp. You’ll want to level up your teammates between each battle for a better chance at victory. Even with proper preparation, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the unending onslaught of fishy foes.

Animal Mafia Embraces Gacha Gaming

Animal Mafia doesn’t try to hide its gacha nature. Open the gacha menu and spend gems to unlock new teammates such as Parrotkoon, Squirrellano, and Skunky. Each animal you collect will have a name that references their species. Your new teammates are adorable, which makes unlocking new ones somewhat satisfying. However, they're not adorable enough to make up for all Animal Mafia lacks.

Animal Mafia is, at best, a below-average gacha experience. The repetitive combat is only outmatched by an even more repetitive soundtrack. Furthermore, a lot of the islands you visit look similar, adding to their tedious nature.

 While collecting new animal teammates has its charm, their cuteness in no way makes up for the monotonous battles. Animal Mafia may feature a cool concept, but it’s just missing that spark of life that Gacha experiences to draw you in.