I remember this game being part of the original technology demos for the PS3. After long delays, it was finally released in 2009 with minimal fanfare. The idea of a safari photography game intrigued me and on a whim I finally purchased this game in 2011. This is a unique game concept and serves as a nice mellow alternative to the shooters and sports titles out there. Afrika does show its age; the load times are pretty inexcusable even for a 1st generation PS3 game and what should be an open world explorer simply isn't. Nevertheless, it is fun to run around getting shots of the african wildlife. You can't help but wonder what this game would be like if it had the open world setting and depth of animation and character ai shown in current PS3 titles (Red Dead Redemption being the obvious example of what a richly populated open world game can be--but then Rock Star are just miles ahead of every other developer right now). I'm thinking the sales were not that great and an Afrika 2 isn't likely, which is a shame, because the idea had promise.

This game has a lot to offer, though I would stress that it's less of a game and more of a nature photography simulation.

I also got this game on sale for $30, so I cut it a lot of slack I probably wouldn't cut it if I had paid full price.

Afrika throws you into a pretty diverse & expansive natural preserve and asks you to complete various photo assignments, while rewarding you with credits you can use to purchase additional camera gear within the Sony Alpha line. It's actually pretty enjoyable if you know what you're getting into.

The game starts very slowly. The gameplay is tedious and the mechanics are pretty clunky. There is no way to fast-travel, so much of your time is spent speeding around in a jeep with poor physics. Run into a tree or an animal? You'll go from 50kmh to 0 in an instant. The scenery, however, is beautiful. So traveling isn't always bad, just repetitive. The game also has trouble deciding whether or not to hold your hand. Some assignments basically just involve waiting through a jeep ride and pointing your camera towards the animal they just drove you to. Other times, you can get stuck because you didn't notice a tiny animal in an area you haven't been to in 3 hours. The photography is a little unrealistic at times. Depth-of-Field is seemingly constant, regardless of the distance to the subject (So you can usually get the same DOF of an elephant 150 ft. away as you can with a lizard 10 ft. away, which definitely wouldn't be the case in reality). It's important to understand that the gameplay itself is pretty sloppy.

If all of that doesn't scare you away, here's what the game does right. It's actually pretty immersive and relaxing. The animals and scenery are beautifully rendered. After the tedious first hour or two, the game really does open up. New animals show up as missions are completed, causing the world to seem empty at first, but slowly team with life. There's a terrific sense of accomplishment when you take a great photo in this game. A novice photographer will also better understand photographic principles by playing this game. These might not sound like big positives, but the sense of accomplishment and discovery outweigh the gameplay mechanics for me.

Overall, getting a great shot of a baboon and its baby is satisfying enough to keep playing a game with this many flaws. If you liked Planet Earth then you'll almost surely enjoy the assignments in this game. The in-game Field Guide offers a lot of information about each animal and would teach younger gamers plenty about the African wilderness.

Get this game if you're really into the natural world, or really into photography, but don't mind wasting time with clunky mechanics in between taking pictures.

Afrika for PS3 is the absolute best video game I have ever played. I do not like video games too much, I lose interest quickly, but my husband is an obsessive video gamer with multiple systems and internet play...
With that being said be BOTH LOVED this game! It was something we could play together that never got old. We were obsessive about it, until we beat it in a week or two, but it would be a lot of fun to play all the way through again, and again, and again.

This is a game which would be fun for the whole family, especially if you are into animals and/or photography. There is a lot of reading involved, so younger kids may not understand it alone, but it is a great game to play as a family.

Somebody as Natsume seriously needs to stand up to management and tell them what 'fun' is. Everything about this game drags. The movement is sluggish, the menus are sluggish. Game saves take about 2 minutes. Saved photographs appear about 1/3 of the screen size and cannot be enlarged or zoomed. No thoughtful collision detection among the animals, either. They threw alot of money at studying film footage of real animals, with the downside that all the animal movements seem limited to a 2D (film) scheme with no forethought about 3D collision detection. All the animals in the game do awkward headbutts with eachother, where one will keep moving in the direction it was going, while the other remains stuck, uselessly moving it's legs; realism- zero. The fact that the environments are mostly flat and undetailed doesn't sell photorealism, either. Photography enthusiasts will presumably enjoy the detail of having real SONY cameras to choose from, as well as the National Geographic seal of approval, what value they have in terms of gameplay I don't know.

The gameplay: finding a spot and wait.
If you run or shift your position, any animal close to you will startle and run, but stay still for a few seconds and you're completely invisible again. An animal will walk toward you, you wait for it's behaviors to cycle to the one you're trying to 'get', take picture.

The problem is that different animal behaviors are only unlocked as you get photo assignments to photograph a particular behavior... in other words, the Hippos won't yawn until you take the 'photograph the hippo yawning' mission. The cheetah won't attack it's prey until you pick the 'photograph the cheetah attacking it's prey' mission. This wouldn't be a big deal if movement was fast, which it's not. There no Zip or Goto Area function; everytime you want to proceed to an area you've already been, it's a slow jeep drive across the same flat, uneventful terrain, and everytime you do, the ingame music goes on, an over the top 'Jurassic park'-ish theme, that clashes hard with the mood of thoughful photography.

Natsume would have done well to examine what worked about the gameplay structure in Pokemon Snap! or the photography segments in Beyond Good & Evil, or how African environments were rendered in FarCry2.

As it is, Afrika succeeds neither as a game, nor as a simulation, because it's neither fun, nor realistic. It doesn't even have that 'not great but had potential' vibe going for it. It's just bad.

Afrika it's probably one of the most underrated games for the last three years. The effort the developers put on this game it's unbelievable, the animals look and move so real, it seems like they use real animals for mo-cap. One of the things that I thought I was going to find on this game it's the animals walking and doing the exactly same thing as the others, but for my surprise I found the animals behaving so randomly, there's zebra walking, other drinking, other eating, others looking on all kind of positions and so on, it's so natural and if you drive towards them, they run on every direction, but they never follow a certain pattern that you can expect with many animals on screen (I gave the example of a zebra, but it's like this with every animal on the game, except one, I'm not saying which, but this animal has a few hundreds on screen at once).
It took me almost 38 hours to complete, but I cheated at the end to get my Platinum trophy, I was ready to go on my last major mission and still hadn't find all the animals (I thought the game was gonna end after that mission), so I looked on a guide online, but only to find out that even after you finish your last major mission and beat the game, you still go back to the camp after the credits and you can find the rest of the animals and finish the lesser important missions that you left behind. So, don't cheat, okay?

I'm hoping for a sequel, maybe on Amazon. Also, they could make a Jurassic Park just like this, sending you back to the island to photograph the Dinosaurs to see how they are doing and get missions just like Afrika. But it's unlikely, because it got such poor reviews among critics and not to mention poor sales (mostly because of the critics reviews).

P.S. English not my primary language. Sorry if there's switched words or something.