Catizens Gameplay Preview

I must confess one of my guilty pleasures, and it’s a mobile game called Meow Meow Star Acres. I played this game for far longer than I would have thought. It’s a very basic farming sim where cats do all the work but it has this sort of simple charm where it’s perfectly fine as a small time waster for those moments where your brain needs to blank out for a few minutes. Catizens looked very similar so I definitely wanted to check the game out.

Sadly Catizens doesn’t scratch that same itch but instead I found a pretty competent and equally cute management sim with cat villagers. The game is definitely more involved than Meow Meow Star Acres and you can actually fail if you don’t play carefully.

The game starts you out with two villager cats, one knight and one architect. You can allocate stat points so I would choose carefully and definitely not do what I did, put all my points into strength for maximum damage. I figured that by dealing the most damage that I would not need health but I was so wrong. I had to restart my village a couple of times because combat encounters gone wrong ended with my village wiping.

Even though the game is a management sim, it feels somewhat closer to a real time strategy game. You can pick your cats and have them chop down trees or mine rocks or even fish. The cats come with tasks they are good at and personality traits so not all cats will be able to do all jobs or get along with each other. Sometimes they will even break out into cat fights.

After collecting enough resources, you can expand your village. Cats need beds to sleep on, a bath house to get clean, and a market to get items they really want. It does feel pretty involved to play. You even send out cats to fight wild boars and later on take on goblin villages. You only start out with one fighter cat but you can apprentice new villagers that drop by into multiple jobs. Yes, this game even has a simple job system.

The game feels pretty relaxed to play. You can slow down or speed up time to play the game at the pace you want to. It feels pretty nice to assign tasks to you cats and watch your village grow over time. There’s always something to be doing, such as meeting the requests of your cats, so it never feels like the game plays itself.

Overall, Catizens strikes a good balance between being relaxed enough to play at your own pace while having enough tasks to keep you busy. The cats even level up as they do their tasks and unlock new things to do. The demo is out so you can check the game out right meow. Ok enough with the nyansense.