Crypto has received a lot of flak for being unsustainable despite its efforts to continue pursuing cleaner and more environment-friendly systems. Animal Race is a project that plans to turn this assumption on its head as it combines a game filled with cute creatures with an advocacy of saving real-world animals!

Background

Animal Race is a Gamefi project created with the aim of helping players generate income from playing while its developers create a relief fund to help animals who lost their homes from forest fires and deforestation that people have caused. The game is built on the Binance Smart chain and aims to spread a message of saving animals through their NFT game. The development team is led by Simba and Jayce Ar and partnered with the likes of Cmoon, Republic of Defi (R.O.D.), and AZ Ventures to name a few.

Graphics and Gameplay

Since Animal Race is about racing animals, the game used 10 different creatures designed in a more cartoonish way that feels like the animation came out of Dora the Explorer and other kid shows that used to air on Cartoon Network. It looks bright and easy on the eyes however, when it comes to the graphics during gameplay, the space for the background in my opinion is unnecessarily large. I believe the team is trying to emphasize the nature theme they are going for but it is also making it harder to see who’s taking the lead whenever two character models are on top of each other during the race.

The gameplay reminded me of Pegaxy where you just select an animal/horse to race and it automatically plays the race out with no further assistance needed from the player. I think that the gameplay is easy and can be played by a wider range of audiences although I believe this is also its downfall as gameplay that is not really engaging makes it feel like you're just mining coins. Immersive gameplay is important for p2e games to avoid making it feel like a chore, after all the project is a game and it’s not much of a game if all you do is watch.

There’s also an energy system for the animals. Each animal has a finite amount of energy they can spend in a day for the races. This is determined by their rarity that goes from Common to Legend tiers. A player can hold up to 20 animals and animals spend a “life point” after every race but can be replenished by combining it with an animal on a similar tier or 1-tier above to reset this “expiry”. Players would also need to pay a fee the day after the animal depletes its energy to be able to race again.

Earning Potential

Animal Race uses the $LION token which is a BEP20 token with a total supply of 100,000,000. It can be used to purchase boxes that contain one of the 10 animal types and as fees for doing activities inside the game. It’s also awarded to players after every race with the amount scaling to the place a player finished their race in.

Final Thoughts

Although the thought of playing a cute racing game while also helping the environment and animals at the same time feels like a really good reason to pick up Animal Race, I think the race is finished even before it started. A quick look at its roadmap and the progress made so far is enough to tell you that it has been abandoned. The token graph also looked like a bad case of pump-and-dump, and I think that spells enough reason to stay clear of this game.

Although I was still trying to give it the benefit of the doubt, there’s no new information about it and the last post on their socials (which half has already been deactivated) was from April of 2022.

Overall, I think the project started out for a good cause, but I believe they burned through their resolve to complete it like the forests they’re trying to save, and ended up with a project that many people and animals would have benefitted from. I think the case of Animal Race is also a reminder that if a project is too good to be true, then there might be a reason why it is. But deep in me I really had hoped that this race-to-save-the-wild game wouldn’t have gone wrong.