Masters of Anima Reviews
Masters of Anima is a great indie title that could have been incredible had it had some more work put in the story to break it away from cliché fantasy stories seen so often.
Masters of Anima mostly succeeds in implementing an inherently troubled concept: a strategy title on a console. It provides some frustrating and subpar moments, but it always comes up ahead with a fun, demanding, and good blend of gameplay styles to pull you through its 10-hour campaign. You'll want to see it through to the last fiercely fought battle.
Masters of Anima offers a decent mix of strategy and action. Those who enjoy a good balance of puzzles and combat won’t be disappointed here. It is not exactly the most original game but the core mechanics are solid enough for it to be an enjoyable experience.
If you are ready to forgive this game for its trivial plot, boring exploration and not that perfect control scheme, Masters of Anima will be able to reward you with a couple of fun hours thanks to the great battles with golems.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Masters of Anima is a more than welcome addition to the PS4 library and, despite having a simple story and some gameplay problems in its console version, it should please those who love a good RTS, with its challenging and fun puzzles and battles.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
The story, though somewhat predictable, is still fun and well executed. It's an attractive game with a solid hook, that plays well regardless of your Switch playstyle preferences. It's an easy recommendation for anyone who loves dungeon crawlers, or fast-paced strategic combat.
Despite a reliance on gimmicks and an, at times, overwhelming difficulty curve, Masters of Anima manages to overcome its shortcomings to deliver a wildly addictive action-RTS experience. Battles are genuinely demanding, but never impossible, requiring an understanding of the mechanics to survive, especially during the second half. The ranking system encourages clever play that would otherwise be lost in the inherent chaos of combat, and the puzzle-solving segments make for wonderful respites where Otto can play around with his Guardians and accrue Anima for any upcoming bouts. The script does suffer from an emphasis on exposition, but, like the rest of Masters of Anima, it carries with it an endearing amount of charm.
For a world as unique as this and characters that seem to have only scratched the surface, I am interested and excited to see what the team at Passtech Games can do to expound on it further.
Masters of Anima caught me completely off guard but in a very good way.
Masters of Anima offers a different gameplay experience, relying on a combination of your own tactically play and your Guardian choice to progress and defeat enemies. There’s a nice challenge offered throughout, nothing too difficult, but enough to push you. If you enjoy tactical arcade style games, then Masters of Anima may very well be for you.
Masters of Anima is a fun minion commanding adventure which is well-polished and balanced enough to make the £15.99 asking price reasonable, sadly it’s not great value due to lacking anything after the main story beside the impressive and well-controlled gameplay.
This isn’t a game that will be talked about for years to come, but it’s a worthwhile experience.
Despite a few small issues here and there with the difficulty and the empty plains, Masters of Anima was a delight to play and is simply stunning to look at. With it's Pikmin like mechanics, summoning various guardian types is seamless and lots of fun to perform for both the combat sections and the puzzles. True, you need to read the tutorials thoroughly and ensure you take in everything they tell you in order to survive, but once you have got the mechanics down the game gets so much better.
In hindsight, it might have been easier, or at least less frustrating, to play Masters of Anima on PC, given the accuracy benefits of a mouse and keyboard. If the learning curve hadn’t been so steep, I think we would have enjoyed the challenge that so many other titles lack. If nothing else, we definitely would have progressed further in the game. This is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of the game, but rather it could be related to our familiarity with a controller because Pierre-Yves barely broke a sweat when he played.
In conclusion, Masters of Anima is an excellent experience which mixes Diablo and Pikmin excellently. I wonder why so few developers have attempted this before, as it’s so incredibly fun to play. A world full of charm, a bumbling, comedic protagonist and incredibly fun and interesting mechanics make this a must-try for Pikmin or RTS fans looking for a new style to try.
With its great gameplay, fun exploration, and nice art style, Masters of Anima pretty much checks all the boxes for a game like this. It is, however, brought down by some confusing controls and a couple useless guardian types.
On the surface of it, most people would assume that Master of Anima would feel just like a Pikmin game but this simply isn’t the case. At times it feels like there is much more depth and strategy with the combat system and it feels extremely rewarding. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Master of Anima to anyone who enjoys strategy games or generally likes a new challenge because this will feel unfamiliar to a lot of people.
Overall, Masters of Anima is a great game. It has a nice visual flair and presentation mixed in with some very solid and unique gameplay that’s not often seen these days. It’s not perfect though, it suffers a little with repetition, flow disrupting difficulty spikes and the odd command issues that shouldn’t be present in a game where real time quick actions and thinking is needed. These issues didn’t stop me from enjoying the game overall however and I believe Masters of Anima will be a solid addition to your Nintendo Switch download library. It’s a great game with a few little issues here and there that stop it from being an essential Switch purchase.
Masters of Anima scratches the itch you may have for a Pikmin-style real time strategy game over and over again. Its unique art style and engaging characters are exactly what you want, but the gameplay leaves a little to be desired. If you are a fan of Pikmin or RTS games in general, we would recommend you pick it up!