The city of Tokyo is home to a teeming variety of animal life — cheetahs in the zoo, cute Chihuahuas in the apartments, about eight hundred million stray cats on the streets. But what if the human race suddenly vanished one day? What would all these animals do; how would they survive? Sony Computer Entertainment has a theory: They’d all fight each other in a vast, visceral bloodsport, clawing and biting their way to the top of the food chain through wits, cunning and brute force. Even the chickens and ostriches.
Tokyo Jungle, tentative title of a PlayStation 3 game Sony unveiled in Famitsu magazine this week, is the latest in the long line of patently ridiculous games SCE likes to release in Japan about once every year. The game’s divided into a story mode and a multiplayer survival mode. The story mode — set in a completely vacant, semi-destroyed Tokyo — is divided into a set of missions, each starring a different animal trying to handle a different task. In one chapter, you might be a Pomeranian dog who’s run out of pet food and now has to fend for itself in the wild; in another, you might be a thoroughbred racehorse running around Tokyo, searching for its old track rivals in hopes of staging one more race. As you go through the missions you’ll uncover why the human race suddenly disappeared, along with some even more sinister secrets — including why there’s a dinosaur or two tramping around town. (We’re not making any of this up. It’s in the preview and everything.)
Survival mode, meanwhile, lets you choose the animal of your choice (over 50 species and 80 different animal types are available, from baby chick to hippopotamus) and survive for as many years as possible. A farmyard chicken taking on a full-grown tiger? Yep, it’s in there. To win a lopsided battle like that, you’ll have to take advantage of each animal’s natural traits, from speed and nimble jumping skills to the power to call for fellow companions and form enormous, street-choking herds. (In herd or pack-based combat, whichever side runs out of pack members first loses. You can even direct part of your pack somewhere else to bait your opponent into chasing them. No, we didn’t make that up, either.)
