While it’s always nice to have some variety of choice, even in the budget gaming space, the more crowded things get the more you begin to expect games to work to clearly differentiate themselves. Granted, with Cattie being a pretty straight-up platforming action game, you sort of walk in with an idea of what to expect. But even on a budget I’ve typically seen more effort put into having the game making its mark than this.

If you’ve played just about any precision platformer of any kind you’ll have a rough idea of what you’ll encounter, though on the whole this doesn’t seem like it’s shooting to be at the challenging end, more somewhere in the middle of the pack. You’ll have to manage jumping between levels, avoiding traps, either taking out or evading enemies, and using standard techniques like wall jumps. While some of its competitors have thrown in completion times to try to encourage repeated play or trying to perfect each stage’s run, that isn’t a feature present here. 

What that leaves you with is a pretty generic experience, without a question, having little personality outside of your character being a cat, and not being the toughest or the easiest game of its kind out there. One note I’ll include is that visually in terms of overall movement and flow, something just felt off for me, and I’m not 100% sure what it was. Perhaps it was the visual effect of the small specks in the background moving while the screen was shifting to keep up with me, or maybe it was just related to the black and white scheme, but something with the game just would start to make my head hurt after playing for a while. Put that together with gameplay that simply in no way felt remarkable or memorable, and it’s hard not to consider it a miss overall.