Developer: Anarteam

Publisher: Anarteam, Plug In Digital

Played on: PC

Release Date: July 12, 2016

Played with: Dualshock 4

Paid: $16.71 (multi-game bundle)

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Riots and revolutions are rarely beautiful.  The outcomes can be, particularly if they result in meaningful social changes that aid the disenfranchised.  However, the process is almost universally messy.  Loud protests, fights, and injuries are all common; one need only look at any number of recent movements – BLM or Free Palestine come to mind – to see how hard the state will crack down on noble goals.  Into this complicated subject matter enters Anarcute, a game which simultaneously sands down the harsh realities of protesting with an adorable visual style while also laying the consequences bare, with protestor bodies littering the streets after major confrontations.  It’s a weird little game, but one that managed to captivate me despite some occasional hiccups.

Anarcute gives you control of a horde of adorable, riotous animals and tasks you with taking down the Brainwash Patrol, a gang of masked officers whose on-screen presence is highly reminiscent of the Inkies from de Blob.  Short cutscenes flesh out the Brainwash Patrol’s antics as they move their oppressive operation around the world, but generally the story takes a backseat to the gameplay.  Rolling around town as an ever-growing cadre of cute creatures, your riot is focused on literally waking up and freeing protestors to add to your cause, beating up cops, and liberating landmarks in order to succeed.  Completing a level gives you a letter grade based on the time taken, number of protestors you ended with, and number of police you took out.  You also earn coins that can be spent to unlock beverages that empower your horde with everything from faster movement to temporary invincibility.  Finally, each level has one or more new species of animal caged up in them, usually well-hidden or -guarded; free them, and a new animal joins your posse for all future missions.  They don’t add any unique powers or anything, but it’s great to watch the crowds of protestors gradually get more colourful as the game progresses.  You can even customize who takes active part in your protests and who holds down the fort as a volunteer, so if for some reason you don’t want the owls to join you in missions (you monster), that’s an option.

Freeing the streets from the police presence doesn’t come easily, and you’ll have to use every tool in your arsenal to do so.  For starters, your protestors have a basic attack that causes them to swarm a target and whale on them, knocking down their health faster with larger group sizes.  This can be a risky move, though, as even basic cop units can easily take out a protestor or two before you take them down, and it unfortunately can feel like coming out unscathed comes down to luck.  To help mitigate this, your posse is equipped with a dash maneuver for evasive action, and protestors automatically pick up objects, which can later be thrown to deal damage to their foes or remotely set off mines.  Sometimes a valid strategy is to just run away while hurling everything from surfboards to park benches at the incoming opponents.  Unfortunately, the auto-targeting can be a bit finicky; one of the achievements requires taking down a helicopter before it can drop off reinforcements, and getting my squad to target the helicopter – instead of the encroaching ground forces – was next to impossible.  Some of the items you pick up are weapons that can be aimed and fired at enemies, as well as vehicles that explode when thrown, causing massive area-of-effect damage or triggering switches.  It can sometimes be a challenge to figure out exactly what options are available to you based on looking at your crowd, but the game at least provides a targeting reticule while carrying weapons and highlights objects in yellow if you’ve got an explosive object that can activate them.

Increasing the size of your protest group unlocks additional abilities, starting with a chargeable stomp that deals a small amount of damage and stuns enemies.  Gaining more protestors allows you to knock over buildings, collapsing them on patrolling police and freeing trapped animals that are occasionally stuck to the sides.  This is also how the beverage upgrade powers get utilized in levels; it’s all well and good to have a beverage that makes a ring of fire appear any time you stomp, but you’re going to need at least 40 protestors to be able to pull that off.  The result is that – particularly in the later, more challenging levels – managing the number of rioters you have becomes increasingly important.  There were times when I’d restart a mission without getting a game over, simply due to a couple of bad fights leaving me with less than 10 protestors, meaning I was unable to even do a stomp.  However, regardless of the number of protestors you have, you can always do super stomps and super dashes.  There’s a meter that charges up as you do consecutive attacks, and once it’s filled, you can choose to do a super stomp to stun a large group of enemies or a super dash: a long-range dash that damages everyone hit.

What really impressed me about Anarcute was the mileage it gets out of some fairly simple mechanisms.  Early levels are quite linear and straightforward, but they gradually open up, giving multiple pathways through which objectives can be tackled.  Each of the game’s worlds ends with a boss fight, and while the first one was pretty easy, later ones got surprisingly hectic and challenging, including one where I had to keep crowding my rioters onto a life raft to keep them from being swept up in screen-filling waves of water.  The regular levels also have some solid variety, including stealth, escort, and wave defense missions.  The difficulty ramps up substantially, and by the time I was in the final set of levels, I was methodically planning out my moves, carefully avoiding traps, and choosing the order in which I tackled objectives so as to maximize the size of my protest group for each one.

Bright and colourful is the name of the game in Anarcute, and it makes the process of completing each mission and taking down the Brainwash Patrol so much more charming.  All the animals are rendered in an adorable big-eyed style, and it was always exciting to see which new species could get added to my posse in each mission.  Having dozens of little animals running around the screen does come at the cost of some readability, though.  I found that – with so much going on – it was sometimes easy to lose track of enemies in the fray, and I definitely lost a few protestors due to a cop slipping into the ranks without me realizing.  The game also has weirdly unstable performance, with occasional stuttering no matter what I did to the graphics settings.  It was never bad enough to impede gameplay, but it did slightly tarnish an otherwise exceptional visual presentation.  I want to give a special shout-out to the soundtrack too, which I can only describe as “absolutely bumpin’”.  The main theme is a great jam that I never got tired of, and while some level sets had better music than others, I still found myself bobbing my head and tapping my foot throughout the experience.

I can see how, to some, Anarcute might come across as too sanitized.  It’s not officially affiliated with any sort of real-world protest organization, and the adorable aesthetic may be a turn-off to those that have seen what goes into an actual riot.  Honestly, I’m not a good person to make a judgement call on that; aside from attending a Pride parade (because yes, Pride is a protest), I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to make the sort of stand that so many brave people do each day.  I do think that Anarcute takes some steps towards realism in more subtle ways, though.  I mentioned before how the bodies of protestors end up scattered around the streets after difficult encounters, and the game’s achievement for waking up 1000 protestors is called, “200 according to the police,” channeling how cops will try to downplay the impact of protests, painting them as insignificant.  Ultimately, the best I can say is that, as a game, Anarcute was a great experience that had me simultaneously strategizing and thinking about its connections to the real world, which I consider pretty high praise.  Class warfare has never been this cute.

8.5/10