Review: Catlateral Damage

Posted by Collin on March 23rd, 2016 | 2 Comments | Tags: Catlateral Damage , Chris Chung , Fire Hose Games

The best way I can describe Catlateral Damage is that it’s basically a cat simulator. As a cat, your job is to knock everything from books, towels, appliances and more to ruin just about everything in the room. If your food is late, you knock everything over. If you sleep too long, you knock things over.

In Catlateral Damage, you’ll jump around from shelves, tables and beds to knock literally everything you can find onto the floor. You can do this in two different modes, both are based on procedurally generated stages. Objective mode tasks you with knocking over a certain amount of items off the side before time runs out. You’ll want to do this in the fastest time as you will be awarded with more points. Power-ups and upgrades can be found by interacting with various cat toys in the rooms. These will increase speed, swat power and height on your jump. Many of the power-ups stack, so the further you progress in objective mode, the more agile and powerful you’ll become. In objective mode, some specific items will be worth more points and you’ll want to key-in on these specific objects. In addition, random events will occur, such as finding a mouse or tracking red dots. Other random events include the level having moon gravity for a certain time, disco lights surrounding the area, or the power going out. Objective mode features 4 levels to get through, with a couple of other secret levels if you can find certain items and find the keys within them. It takes maybe 30 minutes to get through and is the main mode in the game. The second mode is the Litterbox mode, which is basically a stage select where you can knock over items at your hearts content. Knocking everything onto the ground doesn’t unlock anything extra sadly. Here you can find new cat photos and new items to knock over. I was left wanting another mode, but the objective mode does its job, and with the procedurally generated levels, stages aren’t the same twice.

There are a good amount of stages to select from. Including a museum, a lair, a supermarket and a Christmas themed living room. These are some of the special stages however. Others include basic rooms of the house with a bathroom, dining room and living room. The levels are small, but just big enough that there are enough things to find to knock over and you aren’t wondering what to do next. Levels aren’t big enough where you’ll get lost either.

As is the life of a cat. Catlateral Damage features a simple premise in knocking things over, and you’d think that it would get old after a while, but it never did throughout my five hours of play time. Using your paws, you can swipe or poke left and right to knock things over. That’s about all you’ll need to know. There are a ton of items to find and knock over, and each of them can be seen in a collection. Items are simple ordinary items you’ll usually find in a house, lair or supermarket, but some are special items such as toys from other games. Games such as Super Meat Boy, Bit.Trip, Guacamelee and others are showcased. Finding these toys was enjoyable and I was left wanting to find new items that I haven’t found yet to knock over. Over 200 photos of cats and other playable cats to unlock serve as collectibles. For completionists, this is a game you’ll want to check out, as finding every last item and photo will keep players coming back for a while. One of my favorite parts of the game is the enjoyable soundtrack. The music is cheery and sets the tone for the silly mood the game portrays.

With all the chaos going on, the game runs impressively well. I encountered no slowdown at all. There is some frequent screen tearing however, and it can be rough sometimes, but it didn’t ruin the experience. Textures will pop-in from far away as well, but it’s rarely noticeable.

In the end, Catlateral Damage is a small diversion that is enjoyable to play. With only two modes, there is some lack of variety, but the objective mode has enough there to most likely keep you coming back. I wanted to keep coming back to unlock more items and find more photos and I’m still not bored with the premise. The screen tearing can be rough, but in the end, if you’re looking for something different in the gaming space, check out Catlateral Damage.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here.