TactiCats Review (PC)

It isn’t quite as anarchic or as gruesome as Hotline Miami, but it’s a serendipitous encounter that I’m weirdly proud to have stumbled across. In the oddest of times, it was actually TactiCats that found me—a feline-centric “pixel party” game that just happened to promise a myriad of competitive game modes to play through, collectible kittens to unlock, and a vibrant voxel world crammed to the brim with souped-up powers, makeshift traps, and a multitude of different obstacles and other challenges to overcome. It was all there, and while I couldn’t make sense of it at first, it wasn’t all that long before the primal obsession with household pets soon began to take hold. I didn’t know what it was I was signing up for — but it had cats, and that was enough of an incentive. Childish, but I took comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only one.

To put you in the picture, TactiCats is a top-down whisker-friendly “pixel party” game—a beat ‘em up brawler, if you will, in which up to four players battle it out against one another over a series of backyard feuds and other palpable game modes. It isn’t quite as gacha-oriented as, say, Pokemon, but it does feature its share of collectible kittens and other unique power-ups, too. However, at its core, it is a competitive (yet unapologetically beginner-friendly) game, and as such, a gentle stepping stone into the archipelago of online gaming. There’s a little more to it than that, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

If you’ve been licking your paws with baited breath, toying with the thought of picking up a copy of HungryDingo’s newest arrival on PC, then you’ve come to the right place. Here’s everything you should know about TactiCats…

Putting Paws to Paper

TactiCats is, first and foremost, a PvP arena brawler, so while it may sport a cutesy aesthetic and contain a whole bunch of floppy kittens, it isn’t quite as happy-go-lucky as it looks. Well, I say that as if it suggest that it’s a litter of relentless combos and unadulterated violence — and it isn’t that, at all. No, what you have here is a beginner-friendly battler—a four-player title that allows each feline combatant the opportunity to fight against their competitors with a series of power-ups and other scrappy tactics. There are several modes to choose from, each of which allows you to sift between a rather generic collection of maps—living rooms, kitchens, backyards, and basketball courts, to list just a few—and complete an array of challenges. And that’s about the brunt of it.

TactiCats isn’t a dramatically difficult game to learn. It is, however, a game that adheres to a loose trial-and-error configuration—a process that primarily involves alternating between a series of abilities until you correctly determine which battle tactic is best, and which power-ups are capable of dealing the most damage, and so on and so forth. Once you’ve mastered said tactics and swept a few rounds beneath your belt, the game opens up the floodgates for a collect-a-thon experience—an afterthought that essentially grants you the chance to unlock different kittens and try out alternate strategies on the battlefield. And that’s really what the gameplay consists of: battling kittens, and earning your stripes to acquire more kittens for future brawls. Is this an award-winning concept? No — but it does the trick.

It’s a Pixel Party

There is a USP to this particular pixel party: the clever and oftentimes destructible environments that each map holds. In addition to the static set pieces and cardboard cutout furniture, TactiCats also provides a handful of curveballs for you to overcome—flickering lights, hidden objects, and an assortment of makeshift weapons, for example. It’s thanks to these randomized add-ons that, while the objectives more or less remain mostly one and the same, each battle is made to feel different and more unpredictable with each passing turn. And, to give credit where it’s due, TactiCats does that incredibly well. But, as with any gimmick with a USP, it’s a novelty that eventually wears thin the more you carve away at it. It’s one of those things: it starts out entertaining, but eventually, it begins to grate the more you subject yourself to its effects.

As a comical experience at heart, I do believe that it captures the essence of illogical storytelling and unorthodox battling surprisingly well. Sure, its animations are a little janky, but it works in its chosen environment. Is it the best thing you’ll ever dab your whiskers on? Probably not, no, but it does come clean with the occasional laughable tidbit and a few extra collectibles to help boost that overall value. I can’t say that I’d be willing to spend an entire weekend with it, mind you, but with a generous selection of maps to chew through and a solid variety of power-ups to experiment with, it’s definitely worth a few hours of your time, to be fair. And that might be enough of an incentive for you, too. After all, you can’t really go wrong with cats.

Verdict

Obviously, TactiCats is cute — but maybe that’s about all it has going for it. Oh, HungryDingo knew all too well that there would be a market for it, and it knew that, if it contained enough feline friends—enough, perhaps, to produce a giant fur ball of pixelated pedigree hairs—that folks would happily eat it up without so much as a second thought. And I adore cat-centric games, I truly do, so while I too find myself in that woolly-eyed collective ready to shamelessly chase that laser pen around, I can also see beyond the smokescreen, and I can also see how TactiCats is still a pretty mediocre brawler at best. I’m not denying that it’s an adorable game, but I just can’t bring myself to say that it’s a structurally sound beat ’em-up chapter.

I’m on the fence with this one, because where I am able to find the lightheartedness in the code, I’m also incapable of shaking that feeling of something being missing from it. There’s something I do genuinely love about TactiCats; the pixel art style and the swathe of colors that it adopts are inconsequentially unique. But its gameplay is another story; it’s often boring and a little uninspired, to say the least. Of course, I did have fun with the process of collecting the kittens and learning the ropes, but it just didn’t take all that long for me to lose interest in capitalizing on the endgame.

I will say this: if you’re a lover of anything with paws and whiskers, then you’re probably going to enjoy hosing down this particular fluff ball. It’s definitely cute, so if that’s enough of a reason for you to try it, then you won’t be disappointed in what TactiCats has to offer.