Wait… wait this isn’t Steam!?
Developer: 1Games
Publisher: 1Games
Format: PS4
Released: January 24, 2017
Copy purch… I can’t believe I bought this shit
Whatever possessed Sony to start selling and actively promoting slapdash Android ports and Steam Greenlight rejects remains a mystery, but it would appear the PlayStation Store’s floodgates are beginning to swing wide open. Even stranger, Sony itself appears to be promoting some severely overpriced and undercooked software.
Life of Black Tiger first caught the world’s attention when a trailer for what looked like absolute garbage appeared on the official PlayStation YouTube channel. Many thought it was some sort of strange joke, especially as its publication was timed to go up against Nintendo’s Switch presentation.
If it is a joke, it’s one that’s been seen through to grisly completion – Life of Black Tiger is not only available for PlayStation 4, this originally free mobile game now carries an MSRP of $9.99.
Oh, and I can confirm that it is absolute garbage, just like the trailer led us all to believe. There’s something to be said for honesty in advertising.
I think I spent the first thirty minutes of my time with Life of Black Tiger literally opened mouthed. I’m using “literally” in the original sense of the word, too – I could not believe what I was seeing, and I resembled a yawning goldfish as I stared at the screen in mute incredulity.
Life of Black Tiger is a Unity game – possibly an Asset Flip constructed of pre-bought character models – about a black tiger that kills things. You run around sparse maps, get vaguely within distance of sheep, wolves, giraffes and other animals, then hold down a single button to watch a brief attack animation happen over and over again – accompanied by a horrible approximation of a roaring sound.
That’s the most the game has to offer. It can and will offer less than that!
Some missions involve casually jogging (the tiger moves slowly even when allegedly sprinting) to three spots on the map and waiting at those spots for several seconds. One level is about avoiding a huge pack of wolves for three minutes – it is three minutes of running around in a circle. That’s all you do. It is exactly three minutes, I know, because the game has a timer to let you know just how much of your precious life is being wasted.
It feels much longer than three minutes.
These stages where you do absolutely nothing might have been introduced to add “variety” to a game mostly about standing near other shittily rendered animals that don’t belong in the same ecosystem and mauling them with a pantomime level of impact. Either that, or it’s all part of the grinding war of attrition this miserable piece of software wages on its players almost immediately.
As Life of Black Tiger continues, its missions grow longer and less tolerable. Animals take longer to kill, they become faster and harder to hit with the tiger’s pathetic standing attack, the handful of cloned enemies start dishing out damage far above your own output. Inevitably, you’ll find yourself taking longer and longer to complete repetitive levels that haven’t mechanically changed since the first one.
There is, laughably, an upgrade system comprised of basic menus that showcase the artistic talent of a developer with zero artistic talent. Completing missions earns points and these points can be spent to make the tiger slightly – and I mean slightly – stronger, faster, or hardier.
If you think that would make the game less of a hassle to play, I envy you your naivety.
Upgrades are so incremental they barely register, especially once enemies take so little damage you can barely see their health bars decreasing, and the only way to level up in pace with the game is to replay lots and lots of previously completed missions. That means more chasing sheep around, more running in circles for three minutes, all so you can hope to get strong enough to chase other animals and run in different circles.
Life of Black Tiger has a story but the localization job is terrible, perhaps the finest example of poor videogame translation since the 1980s. Borderline gibberish text between missions, often written across a stock photo that’s been run through various blatant filters, desperately attempts to piece together some sort of story about a tiger finding love and having a baby.
A baby that – I shit you not – the titular tiger is happy about not being born black.
So that’s… awkward.
There’s not much else to be said about Life of Black Tiger. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I spent longer working on this review than the developer spent making the sad little excuse for a game. It is, without hyperbole, the worst PlayStation 4 game in existence. It’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played on console, and it rivals some of the worst games available on Steam.
I would rather play The Slaughtering Grounds than Life of Black Tiger.
It cannot be stated enough that THIS IS A FREE MOBILE GAME CHARGING $9.99 ON PS4. I know because I bought it.
Like a complete fucking idiot I bought all 922 megabytes of this fucking awful wank because I thought it would make for an interesting review, which it didn’t because Life of Black Tiger is a huge empty vacuum of content and thought and feeling. It does the bare minimum required to be considered a videogame product without risking a lawsuit, and its one saving grace is that the trailer isn’t particularly misleading and is only slightly less interactive.
Oh shit, I haven’t even talked about how ugly it looks.
Life of Black Tiger sports drab colors, robotic animations, and frequent instances of the camera clipping underneath the map to show the oblivion below.
There are no transitory animations between walking, running, sprinting, or even changing directions, the tiger will simply materialize from one state to the next. This is most noticeable when trying to walk in a straight line – the tiger has eight directions in which it can move, but cannot understand how analog controllers work, so it’ll visibly spasm between two general directions.
Basically, if you’re heading north, the tiger will attempt to face north and northeast/northwest at the same time with stuttering consequences because this dreadful bollocks was designed for touchscreens and fails to handle physical input.
All the physics are wonky, with dead animals falling down in a way that’s somehow simultaneously stiff and loose. Having lost all sense of weight, these corpses can be picked up and carried by the Black Tiger regardless of size. About the only real entertainment this game has is found in the carrying of giraffe and rhino corpses, because it looks funny for the blissful few seconds before it gets old.
Sound is barely existent save for some basic attack noises and the very occasional level in which creepy sentimental music might happen. The general silence that accompanies most of the game lends an alienating, almost nihilistic feel to the whole sorry procedure, broken only by the brief guitar riff that marks the end of each level for some fucking reason.
Fuck this game. It’s disgusting.
Fuck the joke positive reviews for this game, because if you can even pretend this game is any good, you’re probably a really bad person inside of your heart. You’re a phenomenal liar, at any rate.
It’s also a FREE MOBILE GAME CHARGING $9.99 ON PS4 and everybody involved in its appearance on the PlayStation Store should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. I’ve now played it more than maybe anybody in the world (unless anyone’s completed this gross trash because I sure as shit didn’t) and I still can’t believe it’s real.
Is Sony high? Is Sony fucking high? That’s about the only way in which my brain can process this thing’s appearance, imagining that Sony’s executives eat thousands of drugs before making decisions about anything. It would certainly explain why they thought the PSPgo was a good idea.
Seriously, is Sony fucking high? How high? Can I have some of your drugs, Sony? I’ve played Life of Black Tiger, I deserve some drugs.
Let me have some drugs, Sony. Are you high? Can I have your drugs? Are you high on drugs? How many drugs did you eat?
Are you high?
Are you high on drugs?
Life of Black Tiger is a massive piece of fucking shit. Also it has multiplayer.
1/10 Accursed
