Animus – Harbinger is a recently released souls-like game, available on mobile devices, such as iOS and Android. In terms of gameplay, it’s very much reminiscent of Dark Souls and that seems to be the key inspiration for the game, while making it much more accessible for mobile devices. Just like Dark Souls, Animus decides to go with the dark fantasy motif, that makes the overall setting and gameplay choices make a lot more sense and fits the overall game quite well.
The game allows you to attack, dodge, and even incapacitated enemies can have a strong, satisfying attack used against them once they’ve been weakened enough. Instead of changing between 1-handed to 2-handed and vice versa, your attacks are instead split up into single-handed attacks and dual-handed attacks, which can effectively be translated to light and heavy. The way the game progresses is through a quest system, where you spawn at a bonfire in the woods and must pick and choose a mission to go and attempt, with each area having a certain number of missions to finish before completion. From beginning to end you will be going up against strong and weak enemies but will eventually make your way up to a boss, which must be bested to complete the mission, unless you wish to restart back at the bonfire, without any earnings.
While the game is very much trying to be the next version of Dark Souls on mobile, the developers managed to create a title that works exceptionally well on mobile platforms. Movements and attacks are all fluid and combat – of which you’ll be doing a lot of – is very fluid and doesn’t exactly become stale easily. For anyone that loves a good souls-like, Animus – Harbinger manages to provide that sense of satisfaction from the combat, while having that difficulty the series it’s inspired by is well known for at this point.
Once again, deaths are an important part of the game to ensure that you don’t simply grind out mob after mob until you die. By defeating enemies, you’re given memories and gold, both of which can be used to make purchases, such as new weapons that all have their own individual style. By any chance you manage to die during one of these missions, you’re going to lose everything that you’ve earned and must start over when it comes to acquiring memories and coins. It’s safe to say, Animus – Harbinger does what it can to borrow so many different ideas from Dark Souls, while managing to create its own identity in a genre that’s rather oversaturated at this point.
The game isn’t exactly perfect and isn’t quite complete at the moment, but the developer intends on updating the game more and more, one of which involves allowing for multiplayer. This means you’ll soon be able to join one of your friends’ games and help them out or allow for PVP. What the multiplayer is going to ensue has yet to be fully revealed, along with a release date for it, but once it gets dropped, it’s no doubt going to add an extra level of enjoyment to the game as a whole.
