Space Cats Tactics Review: Curiosity Killed The Cat

Space Cats Tactics keeps things apparent from the get-go. Do you like tactical games in the vein of XCOM? Do you crave a little ship management like Faster Than Light? Do you like cats? If you answered yes to even one of those, there’s something here for you to try out.

Space Cats Tactics is the product of Alex Nicola, the sole dev of Mitzi Games. Taking on solo projects is such a massive undertaking that I have to give some props for what’s here. Just be warned that Space Cats Tactics’ attempts to do so much ultimately results in some systems not being completely fleshed out, and the game is often buggy and glitchy. That said, while Space Cats Tactics takes meowing mercenaries to a fur-flung deep space atmosphere, this trip isn’t happening without hacking up a few hairballs along the way.

Cat Burglary At Its Finest

So here’s the gist of the story. You play as a member of a cat race bred by humans to be cat/man war machines. Well, eventually, the cat people had enough of being told what to do and fought for freedom, mostly getting it but at the cost of being feared and hated for turning against their creators. You play as Captain Mitzi, a mercenary attempting to smuggle a very valuable government ship called the Curiosity across the galaxy, with government forces following fast to reclaim it. You’ll get a few more teammates to fill up the ship, all with their own personalities. Said personalities are rather one-note, and while they play the rogue band of mercs card well enough, it’s nothing that really hasn’t been seen before. It’s harmless in and of itself, but don’t go in with high expectations. The charm is in full force, but your mileage may vary on how much that’ll matter for redeeming what’s an otherwise simplistic cast. Be warned; there are cat puns literally everywhere. Then again, you don’t buy a game with the word “cats” in the title and not expect this to some degree.

The lore with the cat people seems interesting on paper, but sadly you don’t see many other cat people, and that’s a shame, as the whole cat people deal is part of the strange, fun charm that’s supposed to differentiate it from other space epics. I would’ve liked to see more crew members, even the possibility of losing some, depending on the decisions made. The novelty is there, the puns are present, the lore is established, but there are just not enough cats, and I stand by my criticism because there’s no such thing as too many cats. Really, a lot of the worldbuilding and the like just didn’t feel like it went anywhere, or didn’t contribute in ways that helped you get interested in the world. There was a general lack of hows and whys to keep things relevant.

How these cool cats (and one human) interact with the ship itself is where things get interesting. The gameplay itself is a mixture of tactical, grid-based space combat and a hint of management simulation via the FTL style internal ship view, where you can send your crew to various parts of the ship to perform commands. You can activate certain abilities by sending people to certain rooms, extinguishing fires, and getting rid of invaders as well. The best part is you can save configurations in one of the numbered slots at the bottom left, something I greatly appreciated as I started getting more rooms and teammates to work with. Does it feel a bit barebones? Yes, and even with more rooms and members, I still didn’t feel like it was a part of the game that was explored as much as it could’ve been. That said, I sincerely feel this is a good angle for a game like this to try, and the actual mechanics are pretty damn solid. There’s a good setup here, just one that feels like it’s missing some extra bits and bobs that could really flesh it out and make it feel involved with the other side of the gameplay.

The other side to Space Cats Tactics’ combat revolves around navigating the ship and performing actions like sending out drones, launching missiles, and using your tractor beam to hoover in pickups. Anytime you’re not in the galaxy map, you’re in this grid-like movement field. You have a set amount of AP to perform actions with, with things like moving your crew around, using consumables, and attacking all using this same AP meter. This makes sense for the most part and operates smoothly, thanks to this. Some might argue that simplicity neuters the tactics, and to some degree, that’s accurate, but there’s enough degree of decision-making that it can be as easy as you’re willing to figure out how to make it be. There are three ways of getting upgrades, via a research tree, shops, and random gets from loot crates. The more minor upgrades you can get from the little loot crates can be slotted into one of ten slots for the ship, and can be moved around and replaced on the fly. The research tree’s upgrades install normally, and the shop upgrades you consume from your inventory and are then added permanently. All of this adds up to a lot of potential for “builds,” albeit more simplified ones. I really like the way this is set up. It’s not overbearing nor sparse in detail, straddling the perfect line of needing a good idea of how you want your ship to run without excessive amounts of micromanagement and number crunching. You can wing it to some extent and still perform pretty well, but finding that delicate balance between interior and exterior ship management is critical to pulling out of fights without suffering heavy losses.

Here’s the Cat-ch

Yeah, I’d probably take the radioactive space slugs over relentless pirate slaughter.

Now onto a few issues. While most of this reads out pretty typical for the type of tactics game Space Cats Tactics markets itself as, the problem is that there’s a plethora of seemingly random difficulty spikes, where sometimes you will have a good grip on the situation, and sometimes there’ll be some right bastard situations that you’ll barely walk out of. You’ll quickly be able to tell these when they happen, as you will come across ships that will absolutely ravage your defenses and essentially render your game over the moment they catch you in their sights. It gets even worse when your goal is either “survive” or “gather enough Purrenium to get the hell out of dodge” since these ships can actually be indestructible and rely on exterior criteria that can extend how long you’re running your ass off trying not to die.

One such happened when I had to wait out three CPU allies as they got obliterated by the enemy. Except when, all of a sudden, nobody would fire on them and end their lives, meaning I couldn’t leave. This mission now consisted of me fleeing for dear life with very little shields to handle another onslaught from enemies that the mission itself tells you will demolish you due to being vastly above your level. Eventually, it finally got back in gear and finished off the last NPC ally, but my escape was very tight, and it didn’t feel very rewarding by the end of it since most of my damage came from the fact that the damn mission wouldn’t end.

Another issue I came across was a mission where a sudden ambush at a space station turned into a rapid rush to grab some Purrenium from slaughtered spaceships while dreadnaughts take some potentially fatal potshots. I appreciated the urgency and tension, but these things hit so hard that you’ll barely be able to escape in one piece, and even when I performed well enough to flee, I had it freak out on me and not progress to the world map, leaving me stuck and only able to continuously end my turn until I gave up and had to redo the whole mission. It’s discouraging that these occasional missions sour the experience, as there’s some legitimately good and well thought out gameplay here that, when all gears are turning as they should, makes for a competent space battle simulator that really nails the vibe it’s shooting for. When it stumbles, though, it really stumbles, and takes me out of the game.

While we’re at it, there’s something of a problem with the transition going from the outside of the ship to the inside. Now, I know my rig’s capable of handling this fuzzy beast, and I haven’t really seen much frame drop anywhere else, but there’s some nasty lagging and frame dropping when making that transition. A reinstallation seems to have fixed it a bit, but it’s still having one hell of a time trying to make that transition. It’s caused the whole game to crash a couple of times, and having had this happen after almost completing a particularly long level left me quite disheartened. Add in a lack of checkpoints, and things really start to burn when you screw up a mission, even by a single wrong move. It’s really a frustrating thing to work with when you’ve spent a good fifteen to twenty minutes doing a good sweep of the area, taking care of pesky obstructions, and complete a quest along the way, suddenly to have a sudden onslaught of enemies pop up and waste you. I had this happen no less than three times. Just a simple little checkpoint system would do so much in easing the pain of being either bugged out of victory or thrown to the wolves in a rather unforgiving scenario that you have no control over. All this said, I have noticed that Alex has been personally responding to other complaints on Steam regarding similar issues and has already rolled out a 1.02 as of July 30th, so I have faith that the situation will improve over time and give kudos to Alex for sticking to his guns and working hard on this fixer-upper.

In Need of Rescue

I really want to emphasize that no matter what score I give, respect should be given to any developer striking it out solo, with Alex being no exception. The visuals are damn good-looking for an indie effort, and the core gameplay is shockingly solid for being a blend of FTL and XCOM. I see so much room for a game like this to grow and develop, and I’d even go as far as to say I’d gladly go another round if there were a few fixes for the lack of checkpoints, laggy ship transitions, and a bit more depth added to the gameplay. Sadly, Space Cats Tactics in its current form doesn’t stray much farther from general tactics roots, and the characters, while cute for the first few minutes, don’t evolve much more from there, either. If you can work around that and some rather irksome bugs and glitches, I really do encourage giving this a run for being something rather unique in its field, if not to give some support to a solo dev that really has passion put in his project.

Final Verdict: 2.5/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed); Publisher: Mitzi Games; Developer: Mitzi Games; Number of Players: 1; Release Date: July 24, 2023; MSRP: $14.99

Disclaimer: A copy of Space Cats Tactics was provided by the publisher