Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse Review (PC)

I don’t generally look at many games that get called a Hentai; I usually avoid them altogether. Still, Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse caught my attention as I was looking through the Keymailer requests on my profile. The design of the characters looked intriguing and the idea of shooting zombies in an apocalyptic anime setting sounded right up my alley.

Game Name: Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse
Platform(s): PC (Reviewed)
Publisher(s):Axyos Games
Developer(s):Axyos Games
Release Date: February 16, 2023

This game sometimes feels a little bare-bone, even though the loop is pretty satisfying. Making it a hard difficulty makes the zombies feel a little spongy, sadly. I prefer difficulty adding a balance that is more than just more health or less damage from your arsenal. The customization is pretty solid, though. Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse has a lot of potential when you look at the general concept and idea of what it offers to players. It is more than just a hentai game which is one of the reasons why I am fine with playing it without needing to explain myself to my wife!

Destroy All Zombies 

You start Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse as a girl who is trying to survive in this world of a zombie apocalypse. You and your friend are trying to find other people to help you out in surviving and killing more zombies. Each level is a sandbox-type map that has a variety of missions around the area. The orange ones are the main story missions that will give you numbers to input on gates that take you to other areas of the map. Usually, these areas are where you can find a hostage that, for some reason, is being taken captive by dragons. Each mission, regardless of whether it is a story mission or a side mission to open up a container housing a weapon or object, is the same. Each mission you are tasked with killing several zombies within a time limit. You start empty-handed with no weapons, but you can find weapons throughout the map. Usually, it is best to just grab the first one you find and continue killing. I gained a preference for submachine guns, personally. The gunplay feels pretty decent when you are playing it via mouse and keyboard.

Once you do the story mission of the map, you unlock a new map you can do the story mission on. You also unlock a survival mode on the map you were just on. Survival mode is very engaging. Zombies will spawn and actively go after you. In the story mode missions, the zombies are generally just existing in the world and will only go after you if you are close enough to them or if you shoot at them first. I also found this was the best way to get yourself to accomplish the side missions, as you don’t have to struggle to find zombies to kill. However, trying to go into a container to grab extra weapons can be difficult as zombies can lock you in by just existing in the entrance to them.

One big highlight of Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse was the customization of the characters. You can adjust the height, the size of the chest and thighs, the hair color, and a variety of unique outfits for each character. One thing I wished was when you unlock the character you unlock the outfits that character comes with for each character, but I do appreciate having them all have a unique personality with the closets they have access to. You also can change the color of the outfits and hair. These changes are also present in the cutscenes in the game, which is a nice touch.

Claymation

Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse has a unique look to it at times, it feels great for shooting and seeing fireball effects coming at your face, but at other times it can feel a little unnerving. There is blood and gore though it being more of a 3D clay effect doesn’t make it realistic. Honestly, I prefer it like that because of the ridiculousness of these designs. The anime-esque zombie designs are over the top when it comes to enemies. Guns are limited, but they look unique and feel unique with how they fire. The backgrounds look nice in this style. Simple but robust in its kind of way. I appreciate the way that it changes the formula with its simplistic design of the more Claymation-style graphics.

Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse runs pretty well at a solid 60fps on PC with my Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card. I played some time with this on the Steam Deck. I tried to play the game before the release date on Steam Deck and it wouldn’t run correctly. Once it was launched officially, the Steam Deck still had some weird minor issues with gamepad configuration, but overall it was rather solid. Aiming feels sluggish until you use the trackpad. I would recommend aiming with the trackpad instead of the analog sticks on Steam Deck.

Screams of Agony

The sound is atmospheric in Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse. It doesn’t do anything too special with how the soundtrack sounds, but it isn’t a terrible happy-go-lucky sound to kill zombies with. The worst part of the music of this game is probably the voice acting. The voices are very stinted and don’t have any emotion in them. That said, an Indie game with voice acting at all is still a big plus for me. One thing to note is that voice acting is a hard thing to direct, so having an Indie studio do them at all is difficult and often overlooked.

The Big Butts

Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse is in the same vein as the Hentai vs Virus and Hentai vs Evil games, where the appeal is the simple gameplay loop of killing creatures with guns. You just get to be cute anime 3D model girls in the process. I loved being able to customize the girls in whatever way I wanted; it made them all a little more personal to me, which is good because the story and cutscenes did not do that for me. It is a fun game to play if you like the loop, but if you want something else to do, you might not like it. I was able to complete mostly everything in just four hours of game time. I just didn’t buy every weapon yet. I would recommend waiting for a sale, as $24.99 is pricey for the amount of content it provides.

The DLC for the game in the steam store unlocks Hentai mode, which shows nudity and adds a feature where the character’s clothes fall off when they get damaged beyond a certain percentage of health. I mainly played the game without the DLC because I don’t care for nudity all that much. I am happy I can get the option to play without it. The Hentai DLC also adds a transparency gauge to the customization menu so you can have the character’s clothing have a sense of transparency, or you can just remove the clothes altogether.

Anime vs Evil: Apocalypse is Available on PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: Disclosure: I received a free review copy of Anime vs Evil: The Apocalypse from Keymailer. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.

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