Cat Quest is an action role playing game developed for phones, Switch and PlayStation 4. Despite that, it plays well using a controller and the art style lends well to looking great on the TV. The game is played from a top down perspective. The graphics are simple and colorful with a 2.5D effect to it, like a lot of mobile games. The controls are basic but that's what makes it so addictive. One button to attack, one to dodge roll, and you map a magic ability to each of the four shoulder buttons.
During your adventure, you pick up equipment on your travels to boost your stats. Picking up the same piece of equipment later on will increase its level and boosts its stats. This makes it such that everything you pick up is useful and helps to improve something. Enemies roam the world and with the hack and slash element it doesn't take long to defeat each enemy. Whenever an enemy is intending to attack, a circle appears below them so you can see their charge time. As your character cannot heal effectively, you need to dodge roll and cannot just tank attacks. Later on, enemies can also use magic and the area of effect will show giving you time to get out of the way.
While you cannot change the difficulty, the game is not hard at all, particularly since you can just stop at the current quest and go somewhere else to level up. That being said, you cannot recklessly charge into a group of enemies as the attack effects will make it hard to judge what's happening. You'll more than likely get crushed that way and kiting your enemies feels encouraged on high leveled enemies. You're let loose in the world almost immediately upon starting the game. However, since powerful enemies roam the north side of the map, it gates you that way. Despite that, leveling up is really quick thanks to the enemies and quests.
There are plenty of sidequests and these provide most of the experience points to level up your character. While most of them are fetch quests or dungeon clearing quests, because they are short and quick, as well as containing a lot of humor, they are very enjoyable. The game is filled with cat puns, some of which are brilliant and all of them will give you a chuckle. It helps that the world is big, but not big enough to feel like a chore to traverse. In addition to the overworld there are dungeons, which are usually caves. They only have a few themes but each has a slightly different layout. They're also very short and the aim of each of them is to defeat all the monsters.
The game does not autosave; you need to rest in towns in order to save. Losing all your health and dying puts you back to the last location you saved it. You get to keep the experience you had earned though but lose all progress of your current quest. The story is simple but charming. Set in a world of cats, your character, a cat, has his sister kidnapped. He traverses the land in order to save her. The unique thing about him is that he is now marked to be the one who slays the dragons, becoming the Dragonblood. A neat thing is all the fourth-wall breaking moments the developers have put in. They teased the appearance of the Lupus Empire if Cat Quest ever gets popular enough.
Storywise, the ending was a disappointment. It felt abrupt and a bit light. Up until that point, while it was never anything complicated, you are invested into the character and his plight. The villain just went down too quickly and after that, the epilogue was short and didn't really answer much. Perhaps that was why it felt a bit empty. Throughout the main quests, there was a lot of backstory that had potential but we never got to learn more about them.
Once you finish the story you're free to complete the remaining dungeons and sidequests. The story will only take you to around level 60 or so and it is at this point that the game becomes a little bit grindier. This is because there is not enough content from around level 75 onwards to keep you leveling up at a good rate in order to tackle the level 80+ dungeons.
The main quest doesn't take too long, around 3-7 hours depending on how many sidequests you do. Completing everything the game has to offer will only take around 9-11 hours but it is some of the funnest hours of gaming you'll have. New Game+ allows you to replay the game carrying over all your items and levels, but the better mode is Mew Game, which you start a new game and set modifiers to make the game more challenging. Overall, do not let Cat Quest's cute demeanor and smartphone origins put you off. This is a fantastically fun game and very charming. The numerous cat puns, slick and easy to grasp combat as well as an addictive structure will keep you going and hoping for more.
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