Words cannot quite prepare you for Aabs Animals, I’ve been playing games for my whole life and never have I seen a lazier, cheaper piece of garbage appear in the store. In Aabs Animals you stare at a cat, Which I hasten to point out is only a single animal.
That's it, there isn’t even a menu, there’s just a poorly rendered cat cycling through animations on a starter Unreal Engine level. This isn’t a game, it’s a transaction, you’re spending $10 and 15 minutes for 1000g.
As I stared into its terrifying, poorly rendered cat-ish features…I started to ponder the meaninglessness of the Achievement system that I have spent so much time and effort putting myself into. Why did I beat all of the Halo games on Legendary? Why did I catch all those fish in Red Dead Redemption 2? Why did I hunt down every flag all the way back in Assassin's Creed? When all I had to do was spend 15 minutes staring into this Cat's cold dead eyes.
Obviously Gamerscore has been borked for a long long time, that's why TrueAchievements exists. But Aabs Animals is the next step up, it makes mockery of the very idea of achievements, the very idea that Gamerscore could ever have meaning in the first place. It assumes that we’re nothing more than points on a graph, trading our money just to see a number go up, and it seems that for a lot of us that is unfortunately true.
Now the developer claims that with the money from this “game” they will donate “
a portion of its sales to animals and other public organisations.” and looking at what this is I was highly sceptical of this claim so I went to their shady website and had a poke around and oh boy, here’s some facts you might be interested in.
As far as I can tell from my research Aabs Inc. is not a real company, at most it appears to be just some guy in Japan. The “Game” isn’t new, it was initially released on the PS Vita back in 2013. They have a creators tab that implies that they’re going to allow more creators to add animals to the “game” but the links on the page just link back to the…same page.
The Company info tab lists no employees, but it does list the address as
Minato-ku, Tokyo, JAPAN which is not an address, it’s just a district of Tokyo.
The store description is technically not a lie, there is a list of charitable donations on the front page of the site but that list stops in 2016 and provides no receipts or evidence of donation, just links to the charitable organisations and a number, but numbers I can work with.
Between 2013 and 2016 Aabs Inc. claims to have donated 202,999 Yen ($1,437.33) to various charities, and with stats on PSN Profiles, we can see that between 2013 and 2016 7446 people bought the game which at $10 per purchase puts us at $74,460. If we just run the numbers on that real quick that means between 2013 and 2016 Aabs inc donated just under 2% of their gross income to charitable organisations.
2% is technically “a portion” so again the store description is not a lie…but come on now. I bought this game to gather footage for a video I’m working on, but I strongly urge you
not to do the same. The website hasn’t logged any charitable donations in years, and even if they did, 2% to a dog shelter is not worth your time, this was clearly just tacked on to the description to make this look a little bit less like a scam.
I’m shocked that something like this was even allowed on the Xbox store and I’m glad that it seems as though Xbox is taking steps to prevent it from happening again, but for now Aabs Animals remains a blotch on the store, and a mark of shame on my gamertag that I get to carry forever now.
There are so many better games you could buy with $10. Correction, there are
games you could buy with $10 because this is not one. Please do not buy Aabs Animals, there are so many better ways to inflate your gamerscore.
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