Developer: Kucing Rembes
Publisher: Toge Productions, Another Indie
Platform: PC, Switch
Tested on: Switch
MagiCat – Review
With (digital) storefronts brimming with games and more being released each day, it’s always difficult to know what is good and what isn’t. That’s where places like YouTube and Twitch for gameplay and Metacritic and 3rd-Strike for written reviews can help out. Based on findings of others you can build your own opinions and decide whether or not you want to invest in a game or not. So when reviewers don’t even know or care it’s hard to inform yourself. That’s where we come in. Here is: MagiCat.
Story
Going on a quest to retrieve an artifact from the big baddie, MagiCat adventures out through the world in search of clues to help them find their goal. With more than 60 levels, that’ll prove to be quite the task. Luckily you’ll find shopkeepers on the way with helpful upgrades to get. At least, that’s what we could gather, we had to hire a professional cat to human translator, since we didn’t have one on staff, nya. With most of the dialogue there is of course very little in the sense of character progression, real story, or even any real conflict. Luckily that does not matter for us and our MagiCat, so long as we help them with getting the artifact back. The story feels unfortunately short, especially with the lack of real dialogue.
Graphics
Rocking the nostalgic 16-bit platformer look, MagiCat leans in on the classic platformer genre to make the characters pop, and the enemies properly dangerous, like the cute, square bats, and amorphous blob slimes. The pixelated aesthetic does help with distinguishing friend from foe, and safe from spike. This makes the challenge (that the game -does- have) feel fair and up to the skill level of the player instead of unfair and unpredictable enemy patterns. Looking at the other parts of the game such as the enemy designs, and the world map, it definitely feels like a coherent title in terms of aesthetics and feel. Included comes a top down map that serves as a level select screen with appealing pastel colors and a scrolling blue background with signposts serving as entry points for the levels.
Sound
The pitter patter of your paws, the soft explosions of the enemies when killed, and the ching-ing of coins, all of the sounds in this game are geared towards the cutesy appearance the rest of the game also has, and it works really well. With little need for other sound effects that’s all you’re going to hear however. The background music has a satisfyingly cute 16-bit feel as well, suitably not detracting from the game while adding a nice background sound to listen to while you run around the levels.
Gameplay
As an action platformer, MagiCat takes away from harder games in the genre. Levels are not pushovers like Mario games, but it’s also not as hard as some other games in this corner of the hobby. Most of this difficulty is coming from well placed enemies in smaller corners of maps, and the player’s skill to navigate them. This makes it really satisfying to finally kill that boss you died on ten times over, or getting through that annoying tight groupings of spikes. The game also uses an overworld map to choose levels, and to place the shopkeepers, which sell some tools to help you navigate the map, such as bridges you can place between the islands to travel across the broken bridges.
To help you navigate the levels, you get a number of abilities such as jumping and holding the button which allows the player to hover like Luigi, giving you some air time to land where you want to. Dashing is another option you have, going laterally left or right, letting the player reach places they are unable to reach with just a normal jump. Lastly, destroying enemies can be done in two ways, jumping on their heads is the easy option, however, you also have a small ranged attack that will arch up a little and land a short distance away from the player. These attacks can be angled up or down to reach the enemy better. Each level holds two kinds of activities, with a time attack mode on each stage during its second playthrough, and three gems per stage to be collected.
Conclusion
Large amounts of options is always a good thing for any market. Choice drives competition for better products, lower prices, or better customer service. However sometimes you’re drowned in choice and the products start looking alike. That is unfortunately the case for MagiCat, with very little companies taking the time to review this title. Regardless of that, we had fun with this title, despite its short story and for the price of admission and given that this is a Switch title, it is a good experience for public transport or on the toilet if you’re into platformers with a little difficulty.
MagiCat - Review,
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