Animation Throwdown is a new game from Fox Entertainment that pits the company’s popular adult cartoons Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, King of the Hill, American Dad and Futurama against each other. One hundred and twenty thousand people have rated this game. It has a four and a half star rating. 4.5 stars! Is it that good? I’d say so.
You start the game by choosing a character and then building out your deck based on the show you pick. Choosing Brian dives you into the world of Family Guy, and Leela is, of course, Futurama. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t really matter who you choose to start. All the decks seem to begin at roughly the same level — it really is a matter of which show you like the most, since you spend quite a bit of time with these early characters. As you advance in the game, you build out decks for characters from all shows, but these starter cards often become your staples.
Why? Because when you battle, you want to combine cards to create super fighters. These fighters have more strength and health and protect you from taking damage. But there is a catch. You can only use combos that you have researched, which can take anywhere from 15 minutes to six hours depending on the combo.
In your hand, you can tell which cards can create combos by looking for the electric edges. Any card with a beaker needs to be researched before unlocking. This is the heart of the game strategy. Know the cards in your hand and which combos you have already researched, then use this information as you play. Research combinations of cards you have plenty of, and, as you play, prioritize rare combos to get the most out of your cards. Also, don’t build your deck out too big before you are ready. Too many new, unresearched cards reduces your combos and can make winning more difficult despite having more options.
Now let’s talk about the deck. You win points by winning battles, and then you can go to the store to buy new cards. Or sometimes you win them in a quest or battle. You can upgrade your cards using the power you get completing certain quests. Upgrading makes the card stronger. If you have two of the same cards, upgrade them to level three and fuse your cards into one powerful card, which can be upgraded and fused again later. Once you have more than 25 cards, you start to build out an inventory. These cards can be switched in and out of your deck as needed. But again, powerful cards with no combos might not make as much sense. You might want to spend time researching your inventory before bringing rare cards into your deck.
That’s about it. There is an area for battle mode and adventure for level-based play. Both are assigned to you in quests. So far I have found the game to be pretty addictive. I did build out my deck too quickly and have spent the better part of the day paying in jewels to speed up my research. I have yet to spend any money in-game, but can see why you’d be tempted to, especially for faster research and rare cards.
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Animation Throwdown is part Magic the Gathering mixed with all the addictive quest-based elements of Adventure Capitalist, which makes sense as Kongregate is also involved in this game. Launched in mid-September, and heavily featured by Apple, Animation Throwdown quickly climbed to the top of the charts in the Games section on iTunes. The app is currently ranked the No. 1 role-playing game and No. 1 adventure game on the App Store, and it’s the No. 3 game overall. These high rankings also helped it snag the No. 28 Overall spot out of all the free apps on iTunes. I am not sure how much longer this will hold my interest as my go-to game, but I can’t think of a reason not to give it a try, besides maybe not being able to put it down.
You can download the game for free on Google Play and iTunes.