Developer: The Gentlebros
Publisher: Pqube Limited
Rrp: £9.99 (Steam)
Released: 8th August 2017
Available on: Steam
Played Using: An Xbox 360 Control Pad
Approximate game length: 10 Hours
What an easy life a cat must lead. Their food is delivered to them, they can sleep where ever they want and everything’s a scratching post. That’s not the case for
the denizens of Felingard, these cats have to deal with monster attacks, dragons as well as day to day life. It’s a good thing you’re a Catventurer and you can help with all these problems.
Before I start with this review proper I have to give a little word of warning, if you have a low tolerance to puns (specifically cat puns) of varying quality then this game may be one you need to avoid. ‘Babies first RPG’ that’s what I would call Cat Quest. Everything in this game is stripped down to the basics, including the story. You play as a cat… that’s it, the game doesn’t give you a name and you don’t get to assign one. Either way, after being soundly defeated you have to gain power and defeat the villain. Shakespeare this isn’t, it’s about as basic a plot as a adventure game gets, but sometimes you don’t need some complicated overarching plot.
When I said that everything has been stripped down I mean it, when you gain a level there are no stats or perks to play around with they all just go up automatically. There are only have four stats to keep in mind, your armour, maximum health, attack power and magical ability. These can be altered by equipping different items for example; your helm may increase your armour class and attack power but lower your maximum health.
Part of the reason for the simplified mechanics might be the origins of Cat Quest as it was originally a mobile game, but not to worry there are no micro-transaction to be found anywhere within this game. The developers have also made an effort to make some changes to the game so that it would be more suitable for a PC rather than a mobile or tablet, one such change is the dodge function (which we’ll get to later).
You have two avenues of attack, melee and magic. Melee is a simple enough affair since its all tied to a single button, magic though that’s a bit more involved. Your magic attacks are tied to the shoulder and trigger buttons, thing is there are six spells to play with which means if you want to swap spells out you’ll need to do it from within the inventory (which is accessible during combat and pauses the game). Gold can be used at a mage school to upgrade your spells, if I’m honest they’re about the only thing I used the gold for really. Sure, you can buy equipment chests at the blacksmith’s but why bother when you can find them in the dungeons really easily. Plus the chests act like loot boxes, you have no idea what you’ll get out of them which can be really infuriating when you just spend five thousand gold on a chest only to upgrade an item you never bloody use.
What I find interesting about this game is that the developers clearly understand how RPG’s work and how they could change things to work with the platform they were originally using. A perfect example is improving items, most RPG’s have some way of making the items the characters are using more
potent, be it adding a materia to your equipment or using something to sharpen the blade. In Cat Quest items are improved by picking up another copy of the item, its actually kind of brilliant in its simplicity.
I find the combat system quite enjoyable, if a little overly simple. In the early game when an enemy attacks a pale circle appears under them, then it begins to
fill with a deeper red, once the circle if full the attack is performed and all enemies within the circle take damage. Later in the game this is mixed up a bit by enemies who create large area of effect fire damage or lay down temporary traps etc. To help you escape (because some of these enemies attack quickly or have large attack areas or sometimes both) you have a dodge roll which can take you quite far fairly quickly.
There are lots of side missions to take which are found at bulletin boards located in towns, although its a little irritating that you can only take on one quest at a time, this includes the main quest.
Cat Quest is… well its a time killer, a pretty fun one too. I don’t regret my time playing it though it can start to feel repetitive after a while especially since nearly any quest involving a dungeon (which is most) boils down to ‘kill everything’. Still this is a game I do give a recommendation to because of how fun the game was as a whole, plus the sleeping animation in town is so cute.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Desktop Dungeons
Bardbarian
Braveland
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