Video Game / Super Animal Royale

Welcome to the Super Animal World.

Super Animal Royale is a top down Third-Person Shooter Battle Royale developed by Pixile Studios and published by Modus Games. Playing as a Super Animal, you must fight up to 64 other players to become the last animal standing.

Super Animal World was a theme park island resort, with its main draw being the Super Animal: anthropomorphic animals created via a breakthrough in genetic engineering. Humans would fly over to interact with said animals... until "The Incident", where various Super Animals revolted and tried to take over the island. Now, the park stands completely abandoned of human life, while the pro-human loyalists (S.A.W.) battle against the more rebellious animals (the Super Animal Super Resistance).

Alongside the standard Battle Royale gamemode with solo, duos or squads options, there are a handful of other gamemodes that rotate in and out:

• S.A.W. vs Rebellion: A class-based Capture the Flag mode where two teams of 24 animals fight for territory and try to hold onto their flags as long as they can.
• Mystery Mode: Plays like the standard Battle Royale gamemodes but with random modifiers applied each match, such as making bullets incredibly fast or slow or replacing all weapons with magnums and hunting rifles.
• The Bwoking Dead: A 40-player zombie mode where the survivors must try to hold out long enough for an evacuation plane to arrive while avoiding being infected by the Cluckles, zombified Super Chickens controlled by deceased players.

Development began in October 2017, and Alpha testing began by March 2018. An early access version was launched on Steam on December 12, 2018, and a demo was released on January 2019, which allowed players to transfer their progress and unlocked content to the paid version of the game when purchased. The game went fully free-to-play in November 2020, with all players gaining access to cosmetics and customization whilst also offering a paid "Super Edition" that unlocks some exclusive perks.

In addition to the game, there's Super Animal Royale Tonight, a bi-monthly collection of player-submitted plays presented by Donk Patrick and Howl Michaels with it's own storyline that ties into the game's lore and upcoming content.

Super Animal Royale contains examples of:

• Abandoned Area: The Super Animal World park, as the staff and guests are nowhere to be seen, instead being populated by the Super Animals.
• Action Bomb: A recent addition to the Bwoking Dead game mode gives the zombies a new ability, being able to explode upon death. This is presented as a meter under them (that only their team can see) that is built up by damage they deal or coconuts/mushrooms eaten and when full, they will deal area damage next time that they're killed.
• Arc Words: "What's a Skullcat?"
• Advancing Wall of Doom: As per tradition in Battle Royale games, the map is slowly surrounded by a green fog which hurts your health over time, called Super Skunk Gas.
• A.K.A.-47: Most guns are referred to by just their type — pistol, shotgun, etc. with the AK being the exception. This even applies to the ammo: pistols and SMGs use "little bullets" while magnums and AKs use "big bullets". The highest-tier version of each gun, however, gets a specific (if sometimes inaccurate) name and model — "Deagle" for the magnum, "Thomas Gun" for the SMG, M16 for the rifle, and JAG-7 for the shotgun — except for the epic-tier pistol which is simply a "silenced pistol" and the epic-tier hunting rifle which is a sniper rifle.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Upon levelling up, the player has a chance to receive cosmetics, such as shirts, hats, glasses, along with other things such as emotes, umbrellas, melee weapons and death explosions. Cosmetics are also rewarded upon completing Super Milestones, which are basically achievements.
• Anti-Armor: The Sniper rifle completely destroys armor, regardless of its tier. The Deagle however only strips off 2 bars of armor. Poison darts, meanwhile, completely penetrate armor without damaging it.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Superite is a purple-ish mineral which is implied to be an essential ingredient involved in creating Super animals. In-game, you must use Super Serum (liquid Superite) to unlock new animals and breeds.
• Armor Is Useless: Played with. Equipping armor can give you up to 3 bars of protection (depending on the armor's tier) which will protect your health from damage. Armor also can be repaired with duct tape at any time. Most attacks can only damage either armor or health at the same time, meaning that one bar of armor can block a point blank shotgun blast that should be enough to kill an animal twice over. However, those 3 bars can be removed almost instantly by chip damage from pistols.
  • Averted hard in the Bwoking Dead game mode. Any level of armor drops the chances of being infected by a Zombie Joe's melee attack by at least half. Armor at full strength, or any armor on a survivor that hasn't been hit in the last 2 seconds, completely negates infection chance. Armor also blocks 90% of melee damage and half the damage from an exploding Zombie Joe.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Hamster ball impacts, poison darts, and Skunk Gas (both from grenades and the cloud slowly covering the island) can bypass armor completely. Melee attacks and sparrows can damage armor while dealing some health damage through it. Attacks from Zombie Joes in the Bwoking Dead game mode also deal very minor health damage through armor. Also, being too close to explosions will completely destroy your armor in one hit while also dealing massive health damage, if not killing you outright.
• Artificial Stupidity: While bots can be tough adversaries, they also often display moronic strategies, such as trying to shoot you with a shotgun from far away, bringing a melee to a gun fight, stopping to heal in open field with you right by their side, among other things.
• Ascended Glitch: Downplayed as it's not exactly a glitch; rolling while running makes you go faster, allowing for better escapes or positioning. The devs then added a mechanic where well-timed jumps grant you a minor speed boost.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Dart Gun ignores armor and deals damage over time, but its projectiles are very slow (making it pretty hard to land shots at distant targets). However it excels as a defensive weapon, getting chasing enemies off your tail if you manage to land just a shot or two. It also doubles as a healing tool when used on injured allies, fulfilling a double function in just one weapon.
  • The Minigun is a rare and absolute monster of a weapon which lets you lay waste to your opponents by mowing them down with bullets in under a second even at mid range. High rate of fire, good damage, and simply awesome. Unfortunately, it takes almost a full second to spin up, slows you down to a crawl while it's spun up, making you vulnerable to Snipers, you can't roll, and every player within about a screen and a half of your location will be made aware of where you are. One grenade tossed at your feet, and you're basically dead. You might prefer using the regular weapons and keeping your mobility instead.
• Beast of Battle: Giant Emus, which Super Animals can mount on and use to attack enemy players.
• Bloodless Carnage: Even with all the shooting, hacking, and exploding, there's not a single drop of blood or gore.
• Blood Sport: In-universe, the Super Animal Royale, where 64 Super Animals fight to be the last one standing.
• Boring, but Practical: An update added Super Powerups, items that you can equip that give you some advantages. For example, the Ninja Booties make your footsteps more quiet and allow you to walk faster while crouched, and the Skunk Gas Vial increases move speed in the Super Skunk Gas and skunk bombs by 25%, and reduces their damage by 10%. And then there's the Cupgrade, which... simply makes you to heal 25% faster. Which is nothing to scoff at; the faster healing not only allows you to rejoin the fight faster, but it also gives you an edge when trying to outlast any adversaries inside the Super Skunk Gas.
• Car Fu: You can use the hamster balls scattered around the map to move around quicker, but you can also use them to run your enemies over.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Bots often display pinpoint accuracy, something that makes them annoying if they have regular weapons or downright terrifying if they're holding more powerful ones like the Sniper or the Shotgun. They even have no need for ammo pick-ups, as in the rotating game modes where you can have bot allies, upon death you have a chance to auto-spectate from one's perspective, and see that they even go into negative ammo, though they still have to reload like any other player. They also deliberately fire their semi-auto or automatic weapons noticeably slower than a human player can or would.
• Crate Expectations: The map is dotted with wooden crates that serve as cover and can be smashed open for a chance to find ammo, grenades, health juice, or duct tape.
• Cute and Psycho: The Super Animals love the chaos and mayhem of battle royale.
• Defog of War: The Bow and Sparrow and the Sparrow Launcher will mark targets and make their position visible even when outside of the player's line of sight.
• Developer's Foresight: This might be the first game in history whose chat swear filter includes the word "yiff".
• Domino Mask: The default raccoon skin is literally wearing a mask that ties behind its head. The others are not.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The banana is an item that, when thrown, deploys as a banana peel that makes your enemies slip and become vulnerable. It's not as versatile as the Grenade or the Super Skunk Gas Grenade and can be easily spotted. However, with some clever deployment, you can set up hidden traps to ambush other players that are exceptionally effective once slipping on a banana makes you completely defenseless for a few moments.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Super Tape can be used to repair armor.
• Early-Bird Cameo: New Super Animals, features, or locations are often shown in SAR Tonight before being added to the game.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Health Juice is a juice that heals you.
• Fake Longevity: Getting the higher level breeds (alternate forms of a Super Animal. For example, the Super Dog has the Labrador, Husky, and Corgi breeds) can be tiresome sometimes: firstly, you need to reach a certain level in order to unlock that Super Animal (the current last Super Animal to be unlocked, the Super Bat, requires you to be level 80); then, you need to grind for DNA to create it. Animal DNA is entirely random and the amount depends on how well you played in each match (you can use Super Magnets, which makes it so you'll receive a guaranteed drop of a specific Super Animal, to alleviate it though); then you need to gather MORE DNA to create the breed you want (more than you needed to create the base Super Animal). Not only that, but you need Super Serum, which is a random drop that you may receive after a match (you get some when leveling up though).
  • Thankfully, there's daily missions that can reward you with Super Magnets, Animal DNA and Super Serum, alleviating the grind.
• Falling Damage: Averted. After jumping from the Super Giant Eagle, you can put away your umbrella to fall faster. Hitting the ground, however, doesn't cause damage, but briefly stuns you instead.
• Fog of War: It's a top-down game, but the scenery casts line-of-sight shadows that make items and other players invisible.
• Furry Confusion: Super Animals can have Mini Animal pets that look like just smaller, quadrupedal versions of themselves.
• Gatling Good: The minigun is a special weapon only found in Mole Crates. It has a fast fire rate and respectable damage, but it needs to wind up briefly before firing.
• Guide Dang It!: Downplayed. There's a few special Milestones, called Super Secret Milestones, which do not describe what you need to do in order to complete them. They're not that hard though; by looking at the rewards, the player can have an vague idea of what needs to be done.
  • The Beauty Sloth Beanie is played straight. There's no milestone listed for it in-game. Nothing in the game lets you know it even exists unless you see another player wearing it. It's incredibly easy to unlock once you actually know how. You just have to play one game as a Super Sloth while wearing any flower pin and any dress.
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal/Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: Players can only equip one clothing-slot item at a time, and only a few of them (such as dresses and costumes) qualify as entire outfits on their own.
• Have a Nice Death: You will be met with several animal-related puns every time you die.
  You have been diskoalafied
  Must have been a cheetah
  You otter try again
  For fox sake, call a doctor
• Hell Is That Noise: Whenever you're inside the Super Skunk Gas, you will hear some... rather eerie sounds.
• La Résistance: The Rebellion, a group of Super Animals who fight against SAW.
• Leet Lingo: Various cosmetic items are priced at 1337.
• Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: Super Animals and Humans coexist in this world. Super Animal World was a theme park built to entertain the latter, while the former being the attraction themselves.
• A Million is a Statistic: Dr. Jennifer Dogna seems to think so - one hundred million Super Animals were killed throughout the course of the Super Animal Royale games, and she is not phased at all after mentioning this to the player. Implied to be justified as Super Animals, in her words, don't end up living for longer than three minutes after they get out of the vats they come from, so they might not even be able to even think of a name before the mayhem starts.
• Mood Whiplash: In the Game Trailer, a cutesy little fox landing on the island welcomes you to the Super Animal world... Then grabs a rifle and guns down a sloth.
  Super Fox: And dozens of animal friends for you to... KILL.
• Noodle Incident: Referred simply as "The Incident", an event that caused the park to close down.
• Our Alebrijes Are Different: The alebrije breed was added in Halloween 2019. The four animals that can have this legendary-classed breed are the tiger, the blue jay, the monkey, and the otter.
• Pacifist Run: The Pacifist Victory milestone, which requires you to win a match without dealing any damage to other players (or yourself), which rewards the player with a unique Fly Swatter melee weapon.
• Proj-egg-tile: The BCG gun, a chicken stuffed into a box, fires giant eggs that explode on impact, leaving a movement-slowing yolk pool on the ground for a time.
• Punch-Clock Villain: We don't know the extent of Donk and Howl's connection to S.A.W., or if they're even involved with the cruel treatment of the Super Animals. It's very likely that they're simply harmless TV reporters who are unfairly targeted by the Rebellion
• Rewards Pass: The "Animal Pass", which offers cosmetics, currency and DNA in both free and paid tracks. It's main difference between other games, though, is that these passes can be purchased and accessed after their respective seasons end as well as having multiple passes active at once.
• Rewarding Vandalism: In addition to the ubiquitous breakable crates, the Super Pyramid and its surroundings are littered with familiar-looking clay pots that serve the same purpose.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • The Super Animals themselves, who are cartoonish anthropomorphic animals.
  • The baby Penguins in SAR Tonight Episode 7, particularly the one that Donk becomes the "Mama" for. They are actually part of the Rebellion and use their cuteness to their advantage to get close to Donk and Howls to kill them.
• Rousseau Was Right: Downplayed. Most Super Animals don't seem to question why they're killing each other, but in promotional material, a Super Opossum that was just born in one of Dr. Dogna's vats was incredulous to the idea that the first thing they'll do is fall off a Super Giant Eagle and kill other Super Animals. Some Super Animals are also shown scared out of their minds at the prospect of killing others as well. It's implied that before "The Incident", the Super Animals were docile and friendly to humans and other Super Animals, and simply did their role within Super Animal World.
• Running Gag: In the promotional videos...
  • Anytime someone thinks they've won the Super Animal Royale, they'll start doing the Victory Dance... only to be shot by a Super Raccoon, who then claims the real victory and does the dance.
  • If Joe Cluck appears in an episode of SAR Tonight, chances are he'll be dead by the end of it.
• Shout-Out:
  • Some of the graffiti strewn throughout the park reads "Are we not men too?"
  • Praise Banan!
  • One of the unlockable breeds for the Super Hedgehog is a blue variant named the Super Speedy Hedgehog.
  • The reveal poster for the Super Hedgehogs is also a direct parody of the poster for Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).
  • The blue fox skin is named Supersonic Fox, which is either another Sonic the Hedgehog reference or a shout-out to the furry e-sports player SonicFox.
  • The "PBJT!" emote is based off the Peanut Butter Jelly Time meme from the early 2000s.
  • The names of the Super Animal Royale Tonight reporters, Donk Patrick, Howl Michaels, and Joe Cluck, are a reference to real life sportscasters Dan Patrick, Al Michaels, and Joe Buck, respectively.
    • An unrelated shout-out would be their later companion, Super Husky inventor Thomas Sledison.
    • And SAR Tonight's Giant Eagle conveyance is named Jimmy Talon.
    • Continuing the trend of characters having names that are parodies of real life people, Doctor Jennifer Dogna is named after Nobel Prize winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna.
  • An amusement park located in an island, its main attraction being creatures created by genetic manipulation, which became abandoned after an incident. Sounds familiar?
  • The safe area inside the Super Skunk Gas is referred to as "the circle of life".
  • One of the zones in the game is called Super Animal Farm.
• Smelly Skunk: Exaggerated, since the Super Skunk gas is so bad it kills you if you come in contact with it for too long. It's even weaponized with the Skunk Bomb. Averted with actual skunk characters, who are just another skin to unlock.
• Speaking Simlish: The super animals speak entirely in "bwah-bwah-bwah"s pitched up to chipmunk levels. This includes when players talk to each other using the chat. The exception (not counting the announcers in the promo videos) is Jennifer Dogna, who speaks in distinct bow-wow noises instead, not unlike Blue from Blue's Clues.
• Story Breadcrumbs: There's a good amount of information that can be derived from both the promotional material and gameplay locations. Of note:
  • In "Where are Donk and Howl?" in Tonight, Catfive, a Super Rebellion spy, eats a wing from Joe Cluck 2, but puts it away as soon as it's shown on camera. Although played off as a gag, the implications are disturbing, as the Super Rebellion's secret hideout resides in the Super Animal Farm in gameplay, where fruit and vegetables grow, thus it's implied they subsist from them, and the Super Animals' Trademark Favourite Food is the banana. This makes Catfive's behaviour questionable at best.
  • In a case of Gameplay and Story Integration, Dr. Jennifer Dogna puts on a gas mask when the Super Skunk Gas reaches her hidden lab. The Very First Skullcat also hides in their sarcophagus after a while. Given both options, either the Super Rebellion use gas masks or they reside in an isolated space that prevents the gas from leaking in to be able to do things within or after games. Even then, in Tonight, there's also an implication that matches might have been prerecorded some time ago as well (within the context of the story) - In "Barn to be Wild", the Super Skunk Gas is closing in on a barn within Super Animal Farm, on supposedly live feed, but if it was the case, the gas would have reached Donk and Howl a long time ago.
• Temporary Online Content: During the game's Early Access period, there was the Founder's Edition DLC which offered exclusive Super Animal breeds, cosmetics and an orange color for their in-game username. After the game launched in August 2021, the Founder's Edition is no longer available to purchase.
• The Last of These Is Not Like the Others: The Super Animals available from the start are Fox, Tiger, Bear... and Skullcat.
• Three-Quarters View, with some rather tall buildings to boot. Players are prevented from hiding behind them in a few ways: One, horizontal walls that are more than chest-high have a dead zone above them where players can't stand. Two, the entire top halves of buildings are semi-transparent from ground level and disappear completely when you get close. Finally, a number of buildings have a line of trees behind them, which also become semi-transparent as well when players are behind them.
• Universal Ammo: Ammo for the weapons are split into simple types, "little bullets" for weapons such as pistols and tommy guns, "big bullets" for larger guns such as magnums and aks, "rifle bullets" for the hunting rifle and snipers, "shells" for all shotguns, and "universal ammo" for miscellaneous which includes dart guns, egg launchers, and crossbows.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There's a rat locked up in a cell inside one of the caves. You can shoot him dead if you feel like. Although considering that the Super Skunk gas can reach him and he has no ways to escape it, this can end up being a Mercy Kill. You can also shoot him with a Poison Dart Gun to complete a Super Secret Milestone.
• Virtual Paper Doll: There are several cosmetics you can earn to deck your Super Animal with.
• Visual Pun: The "Deagle" (Desert Eagle pistol) has an actual eagle beak on it, and makes a screech sound when it fires. The JAG-7 shotgun has a jaguar print pattern on it.
• World of Pun: The creators of Super Animal World went all out with this one. Establishments include the Beakeasy, Pie of the Tiger, Cattitude, Eggsotic Cuisine, and a Pandup Comedy stage. The Beakeasy in particular boasts performances by Blue Jay-Z, Lady Caw-Caw, and Kelly Larkson. See also Have a Nice Death above.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The Bwoking Dead gamemode revolves around this premise, with the remaining survivors of an outbreak of the "Cluckles" attempting to hold off hordes of Zombie Joes to escape off the island via evacuation helicopter.
• Zombie Infectee: In The Bwoking Dead, Super Animals infected by Zombie Joes with scratches become these, slowly transforming over the course of a few seconds allowing them to group up with uninfected Animals to surprise attack them.