Life of Black Tiger

Life of Black Tiger is a video game originally released in 2014 for the iOS and Android devices by a Korean game development company 1Games. In 2017, it garnered infamy after it was ported to the PlayStation 4. This page will mainly cover the terrible PS4 port, while the mobile version is at least just mediocre.

Life of Black Tiger

That scream of death you hear is Sony's quality control manager getting mauled by the black tiger.

Genre(s):	Action-adventure
Platform(s):	iOS Android Playstation 4
Release Date:	January 17, 2017
Developer(s):	1Games
Publisher(s):	1Games
Series:	Life Of series

Why Software Called As Game Is What You Hate Most

When the game was released on mobile it was a free download, but on PS4 you have to pay US$10 to play it and there are zero improvements over the original mobile version. This is most likely due to the mobile version containing ads as a way of profit for the developers, but it's also inexcusable due to the game's quality.
Boring, repetitive, and tiring gameplay that consists entirely of running around barren environments following people, surviving for a set amount of time, or hunting a set number of specified animals. It feels like the typical pre-made asset filled scam game that would show up on Steam Greenlight.
Horrible controls. Combat consists of merely holding down instead of pressing one button and waiting for agonizingly slow attack animations to complete until the enemies die. The tiger can move in eight directions but doesn't know how analog control works, so if you're moving with the analog stick, it will spasm and lurch between two directions when attempting to run in a straight line.
As the levels are completed, enemies become stronger and tougher and the upgrades you can acquire are so ineffective that you have to replay levels many, many times to get the tiger on par with them.
Broken multiplayer mode.
There is a story but the plot is depressing, the localization and grammar are so poor that the text in-between missions are borderline gibberish. It is clear that 1Games used a translation engine for this. Examples are: "I'll never step back, Let’s survive till the fixed time." and "Animal called as a human is what I dislike the most."
- Due to the poor localization and grammar, the game states you lose (more specifically penalized) points after completing a stage, when in fact you're gaining points used to upgrade your stats. It also happens in reverse.
- The line "The female tiger finally gave birth to a baby. It's good to find the baby is not a black one like me. I'm lucky. I'll protect my loving family with life" comes off as a very racist statement.
Extremely low-quality graphics with grainy textures, poor frame-rate, very short draw distance, and choppy animation that ends abruptly with no transitions in between them, making the game look worse than some PlayStation 2 titles. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, with its really buggy release and huge day-one patch, looks way better than this! Heck, this game even makes SpongeBob HeroPants graphics look gorgeous and it also even makes Cyberpunk 2077 physics look stable! To add more insult to injury, the mobile versions don't look any better.
- To rub salt in the wound, this game runs on Unity engine, which has powered many good looking and running games such as Cuphead, Brawlout, SUPERHOT, Hollow Knight, Yooka-Laylee, Slime Rancher, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, Snipperclips, Golf Story, Night in the Woods, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2, Genshin Impact, Surgeon Simulator 2013, POSTAL: Brain Damaged, and even the DRM-infested DOOM modern console ports and The Elder Scrolls: Blades. Even worse is that some of these games on the Nintendo Switch run at 1080p/60FPS which is inexcusable for a game with such low-quality graphics.
- But keep in mind that the Unity engine is no stranger to awful shovelware namely on Steam and Google Play. Its games such as Life of Black Tiger give the engine a bad name and it's no wonder why people on YouTube like The Angry Video Game Nerd, DXFan619, some Unreal Engine elitists and even some PC Master Race elitists often say negative things about the engine itself, which handles no responsibility of said games.
- Despite the awful graphics, the game mostly runs at 20 FPS, which is completely inexcusable for the PS4! And worse, the mobile version's framerate depends on the hardware, meaning that if you have a 6 GB RAM device for example, it runs at 30-50 FPS!
There is no collision detection aside from invisible walls around the levels. You can pass through objects like trees as if they are not there. Animals can stack on and clip through each other when walking.
Bad sound design, ex: there are only a few sound bites for each creature and the background noises repeat incessantly. Complete lack of in-game music except for 3 seconds of the guitar after completing a mission.
The music heard in the trailer on the official PlayStation channel is the uncredited work of YouTube content creator JackonTC. The music used in the trailer is JackonTC's cover of "Next To You" from the OST for the anime Parasyte -the maxim- (寄生獣セイの格率 Kiseijū Sei no Kakuritsu).
- Hell, even JackonTC himself acknowledges that, but he still continues to get praised for his cover regardless.
- The song itself is also unfitting for the game.
Since the mobile version had no artwork and instead had pre-rendered screenshots of the game as the app icon and start screen, they decided to give the game an AAA look by taking a stock image of a tiger from ShutterStock and edited it with a simple Photoshop job by just recoloring everything from the original image.
No PS4 Pro support despite coming out after the said model (well, not that it would've mattered from the extremely low quality of this game). Worse enough, it is available for the PS5 through backwards compatibility!
The "intro" is nothing more than a scene of a few people going one way lasting a few seconds, the character movement animation is stiff and the renderings look the same as the in-game graphics.

Reception

"What were they thinking?"The Shit Scale

Games that are debatably bad	High level of shit contamination	The very high category	The severe zone	Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde	Major code red
					👆

This product belongs to the "MAJOR CODE RED" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.

The game has been heavily panned by Jim Sterling and Digital Foundry, who have both declared it to be the worst PS4 game to ever be released. Although user reviews on Metacritic are mostly positive, they are all very sarcastic. Angry Joe gave to the game the third place in his "Top 10 Worst Games of 2017" video.

The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed this game and criticized its terrible controls, horrible graphics, bad hit detection, nonsense story, terrible SFX and music. He ranked the game on his Shit Scale under the "Major Code Red"(The games that don’t even qualify as games)" category.

Trivia

This is the first time the Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed a more modern game not counting his Wii game reviews in AVGN Christmas Carol and Spider-Man 2 on the GBA in Spider-Man episode.
1Games was mostly obscure (even from avid mobile gamers) prior to the PS4 port of this game.
This is their only game available on the PlayStation store.

Videos

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