Disclosure:
The answer is it may be unprofessional in some peoples' eyes but it was 2 of the most tedious and awful hours I've spent on a game in a long time and this is less a review and more a public safety warning to warn people off going anywhere near this joyless slog of a game that might actually have been more boring than my time playing Xenominer long ago where I managed 5 hours before giving up. This is a free to play mobile game economy they forgot to rebalance for a paid for PC game.
Name: Strike Force Kitty
Price:£5.79 on Steam
Free on Android
Reviewed on: Laptop 1
Review:
In theory Strike Force Kitty could be a cool concept for a game. You run through auto running levels as a team of cats where your input is causing them to jump. If you run into a team of foxes the game goes into an automatic semi turn based battle system that runs in real time with essentially delays between being able to attack. The battles too are almost all automatic save for you being able to use one of your team's abilities to aid in battle, with 4 cats so 4 abilities but only being allowed to initially use each ability once per level.The real player input and gamplay come from dressing your cats in different costumes that influence their stats along with unlocking and levelling up different abilities for your cats. The different abilities also have exploration elements (that don't count as using the ability up and can be used even if you used the ability in combat) so as an example you can unlock the ability to use portals or smash obstacles. The costumes are acquired piece by piece by repeatedly defeating the Foxes in level who wear that specific outfit, each level has its own set of costumes meaning there's a lot to collect though with each subsequent level generally having more powerful stats on the outfits older outfits become obsolete quickly. The outfits themselves are borderline copyright infringing costumes based on fairly well known characters from film, tv and other video games.
All I've said so far could add up to a nice fun casual game that doesn't need much input from the player and can be nice and relaxing to play. The problem is this is basically a mobile game economy that's not been rebalanced for the non free to play PC release. The Grind is real. Repeating the levels 2-3 times to get all currency chests and costume pieces is fine but the game requires you to keep grinding the same levels again to power up your cats to meet the requirements to even stand a chance on the next level. In 2 hours of play time I made it to level 5 and that was only by cheesing it. The games levels take maybe a minute at most to get through so that's 30 minutes of grinding collecting fish on each of the 4 levels and even then I'd have needed to do a lot more to get through things properly. The Step up between each level is huge, you can be 1 shot killing the enemy and taking no damage on one level as still find yourself struggling on in 1-2 levels time. You see you have to grind to get fish, you then spend fish in the gym to train your cats stats. You can train health, their agility or their attack power. I literally started to Min Max with my frontline being high health tanks to absorb shots and being Melee to make sure they stayed in the front, while my backline were based round damage and agility (agility letting your cat have less cool down between attacks) all with ranged weapons and I was still getting my ass kicked simply because I'd not done enough grinding.
You can tell the game is a mobile game economy because the gold you get can be spent on meals that give your cats limited time boosters (like being able to use their special abilities more times per level). OR you can spend it on a chance wheel style game where you can more easily earn fish instead of grinding the levels. It seems very clear that in the mobile game selling more fish or more gold to spin the wheel would be obviously done, especially as the chests of gold in levels don't respawn and you get maybe 2-11 gold per completion of a level and a spin of the wheel costs 30 gold.
Verdict:
A game that could have done well as a basic but fun title was ruined by a mobile esc grinding difficulty in a PC game that unlike its mobile version it's not Free 2 Play. This is a tedious waste of your time and would be a waste of your money to buy, in the present state as it needs to be rebalanced to actually be more fun to play and less grindy.Composite Score:
Final Score
