Party Animals is a multiplayer physics-based Party Game by Recreate Games, where adorable animals clumsily fight each other to the death.
There are three game modes: Last Stand, where the last team standing wins, Team Score, where teams try to score points by completing an objective, and Arcade, which are other modes that do not fall into the former 2 categories.
The game's initial planned release was in late 2020, but was ultimately released on September 20, 2023. The Steam page is here
and the official website is here.
See also Gang Beasts for a game with a similar premise but fewer fluffy animals.
Party Animals provides examples of:
- Automatic Crossbows: The two crossbows available can fire arrows indefinitely without reloading.
- Batter Up!: Players can wallop each other with wooden baseball bats. The user swings the bat downward like a hammer.
- Bloodless Carnage: Like Gang Beasts, characters commonly get beaten to a pulp, run over by trains and tossed into giant Deadly Rotary Fans with not a single drop of blood spilled.
- Captain Ersatz: One of the available fighters is a fat orange cat with a bowtie, comically named Garfat.
- Catapult to Glory: On the Trebuchet map, you're supposed to fling lit bombs to the enemy team's side using your team's eponymous trebuchet, but there's nothing stopping you from flinging yourself or your teammates to the other side to deliberately knock your foes out and toss them into the river, or to throw away their unlit bombs.
- Cats Are Mean: You can expect to see Nemo being beat-up by Macchiato in the information video that plays before any Last Stand maps that demonstrates the unique feature of that map.
- Comeback Mechanic: Players who are eliminated from the round on Last Stand maps can periodically toss fish, banana peels or bombs into the arena to mess with the remaining players or assist still-living teammates.
- Crossover: Party Animals has allowed their adorable avatars to dress up in some iconic outfits through the use of IP Collab outfits.
- In September 2023, Carrot and Nemo were given the outfits of Rayton from F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch and Gordon Freeman from Half-Life respectively.
- In October 2023, Ori and Naru from Ori and the Blind Forest joined the playable roster as purchaseable characters.
- In January 2024, The Lamb of Cult of the Lamb fame also entered the fray as an unlockable skin.
- February 2024 saw the addition of Om Nom from the Cut the Rope franchise as a playable character.
- Crossover Cameo: Nemo and Macchiato themselves. Their first appearances were actually as adoptable pets in the life-sim game My Time at Sandrock, and Pathea allowed Recreate to use their likenesses in Party Animals since the developers of both games are close friends.
- Cute Bruiser: All of the fighters available are cute fuzzy animals who run at each other fists swinging.
- Deadly Gas: In the Ichiban map, toxic green gas is present at the edges of the arena, explaining why combatants who fall off it too far out die. Over time, the gas wafts into the arena, shrinking the battlefield.
- Deadly Rotary Fan:
- Large ones are present on the Wind Tunnel map, and players must pull levers to raise up walls in the center of the main platform to keep from being sucked in.
- There are also the propeller blades at the back of the aircraft on the Broken Arrow map that can easily knock players out.
- The engines on Typhoon also count, as you die instantly if you get sucked through those.
- Diving Kick: Players can jump and hurl themselves foot-first at opponents in a move that would look cool if they weren't stuffed animals with stubby feet.
- Female Feline, Male Mutt: The game's mascots, Nemo and Macchiato, are respectively a male Pembroke Welsh Corgi and a female Manx cat.
- Gacha Games: Deliberately-invoked trope, the in-game shop has a slot machine to reveal a random character skin. Or you can buy one of a rotating set of options for set prices instead.
- Game Within a Game: The goal of the 'Into The Game' map is to take control of your team's arcade machine. Once you do, you have to dodge bombs on an in-game video monitor while collecting coins and gems to fill up your team's meter. Players from other teams can knock you out while you're on the arcade machine, kicking you out of it temporarily.
- Go-Karting with Bowser: The Quick Match pairing screen shows Nemo, Macchiato, Underbite, and Lloyd playing video games on/around a couch.
- Great Escape: The tutorial level is framed as such, having you escape from an animal cage in a storage lockup, run from robotic cat droids with hammers and beat up office personnel to escape some kind of research facility.
- Guest Fighter: Ori and Naru were added to the game in a post-launch update as playable characters.
- Harmless Freezing: Zig-zagged. Characters hit by pellets from an ice cube gun are frozen in ice for a few seconds, but they thaw out none worse for the wear. However, getting frozen by being in the ocean too long on Icebreaker, staying away from a lit campfire too long in Winter is Coming, or thrown out of the cabin in Winter Cabin results in death shortly afterward.
- High-Altitude Battle: One of the Last Stand locations is atop a stealth aircraft. Players lose if they fall off the plane.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Due to the nature of the game's wacky physics engine, players can easily end up knocking themselves out with nunchucks while flailing them around. One of the in-game loading screen tips even states that this is completely intentional.
- Idle Animation: Characters who stand still long enough either scratch their bottoms or twist their waists.
- Insistent Terminology: The Narrator calls the giant red mace "the Lollipop" because this funny physics party game is definitely not violent, and that's obviously not a Mace, and *most definitely* not a Xi Gua Chui Mace!
- Interactive Start Up: The player can control Nemo during the Recreate logo splash screen while the game loads, and can mess around with the logo's letters, which have their own physics and play short piano notes when attacked or knocked over.
- Letting the Air out of the Band: Sometimes, if you get knocked out, the game briefly slows down, and the music along with it.
- No Plot? No Problem!: A bunch of silly and cute animals are beating the heck out of each other. Why? Who knows!
- Number of the Beast: One of the unlockable achievements is titled after this.
- Palette Swap: Each character has multiple colors to choose from, which can be scrolled through in the character select screen.
- A Pig Named "Porkchop": The default Pig is named Bacon.
- Pun: Bruce, the great white shark, has four possible outfits that vaguely look like jerseys (with numbers) that would've been worn by legendary basketball player Shaquille O'Neal. Specifically, the Magic, the Lakers, and the Heat (two of those, actually). After all, Shaq does kinda sound like "shark".note
- Ragdoll Physics: The game is touted as a "physics based party game". Fighters smack each other around, projectiles can push players in the opposite direction, and a missed attack while airborne or during a sprint usually throws the character like a toy. Characters even flop around while running.
- Ring Out: In Last Stand, one means of defeating opponents is to force them off the plane, platform, or submarine. In the latter, players can swim to a degree and climb back up onto the sub.
- Rise to the Challenge: On the submarine level, the water gradually rises as the submarine sinks, forcing players closer together as they try to avoid drowning, eventually leaving only the masts above water.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the available fighters resemble Psyduck.
- One of the items is a can of spinach that buffs the stamina of the player that consumes it.
- One of gorilla Barbie's outfits is "Barbie in Black".Flavor Text: "Ladies and gentlemen, if you will, please look right here."
- Some names given to achievements make some notable references:
- Band of Brothers
- Bowling Alley Cat
- Die Hard
- Dog In The Wind
- Dutch's Plan
- Fly Me To The Moon
- G-Man
- Hooray! The Earth's Strongest Animal
- I'm Back
- Immortal Kombat
- Jack and Rose
- Justice Rains From Above
- L'Arrivee D'un Train
- Man vs. Wild
- Mission: Impossible
- Navy OTTERs
- Nemo For Speed
- Not Like Pat Roach
- Patte d'Or
- Ready Player One
- Reservoir Dogs
- Roy Makaay
- Run Forrest Run
- Super Bowl
- Survivor
- Tarzan
- The Hurt Locker
- The Klaw
- The Mighty Ducks
- The Vortigaunts
- Total War
- Up
- Waterloo Bridge
- Willy Wonka
- Wreck-It Ralph
- Some of the map names are references to other media, notably Winter Is Coming, Fluffy Redemption and Final Destination.
- Several skins in the game are direct references to Star Wars, such as Storm Harry, Dark Force Harry, and Dark Force Levi.note
- The icon for the "Sayonara" achievement is a direct reference to the infamous Yamcha death pose from the Dragon Ball franchise.
- Shovel Strike: Among the randomly dropping weapons on the battlefield is a shovel taller than the characters are, which are slow but make the wielders harder to fight close-range.
- Sprint Meter: A ring around the character's portrait on the top left of the screen indicates how much stamina the character has, and the character can only climb or run so long before it empties.
- Stalked by the Bell: A few of the Last Stand maps have built-in events besides ramping up the intensity of existing hazards that occur to keep players from stalling:
- The noxious gas in Ichiban rises up to the main platform and closes in on remaining players, eventually enveloping the whole arena.
- The submarine in Typhoon eventually sinks, dumping the remaining players into the water.
- The wings of the airplane on Broken Arrow begin to freeze, making the plane stall at first then nose dive shortly afterwards, taking remaining players with it.
- The iceberg on Icebreaker continually breaks into smaller and smaller pieces that eventually start to sink, forcing players into the frigid ocean.
- All the switches that raise the safety walls on Wind Tunnel will eventually break with repeated use, leaving the players helpless when the wind kicks up again.
- Static Stun Gun: One of the weapons you can pick up is a stun gun, which electrocutes and incapacitates its target and anyone that comes into contact with them for a few seconds.
- Super Swimming Skills: Subverted. Player characters can swim, but swimming around in any non-tepid body of water causes stamina loss, and players sink and drown once their stamina runs out. This becomes a problem on the Typhoon map when the sub goes under the water, forcing the players to fight for less and less solid ground. The water in Icebreaker is also very cold, quickly freezing anyone caught in it for too long.
- Technicolor Toxin: The Deadly Gas that enters the Ichiban map is light green.
- Traintop Battle: 'Fluffy Redemption' takes place on top of two adjacent locomotives. The goal is to get ahead by carrying chunks of coal to your team's train engine to speed it up, or by boarding your rivals' train and pulling the brake lever to slow them down.
- Unrealistic Black Hole: The Blackhole Lab spawns a small one in the center of the screen periodically. While active, it sucks players towards it (but not into it) and soon disappears, dropping players who can't find something heavy to grab onto into a pit to their deaths.
- Video Game Dashing: Players can run faster by holding down a certain button, during which the character will run faster and trail white dust, but it can't be done indefinitely due to the Sprint Meter.
- Worthless Yellow Rocks: Early on in the game's release, the game would only give out Cookies at any level-up beyond Level 100, with no limit. So quite a few players quickly ended up with millions and millions of Cookies...and nothing to spend them on. The game was later modified to limit it to two level-ups per day beyond Level 100, and instead give out a Mystery Box each time that could yield Cookies (1,500-5,000), Nemo Bucks (200-600), or Egg Coins (1-3).
- X-Ray Sparks: When a player gets tazed, the critter flashes. The combatants look like stuffed animals, but they do have skeletons.
