Making family-friendly games has to be a bit of a challenge, as on the one hand you don’t want to dumb things down too much, but you need to make them as approachable as possible. Of course, even mildly watering down play can be risky, so there needs to be a balance to things. Paws of Fury actually seems to do a decent job of finding this balance in terms of its level of difficulty, not making itself a cakewalk, but certainly landing on the more forgiving side of the equation. Where it struggles ends up being with its general direction possibly too open-ended, failing to provide enough structure to help make all of its varied action more satisfying.

Starting with what the game does well, the answer is a little bit of everything, but in a light and pretty friendly sort of way. This isn’t simply a 3D mascot platformer, with you going through the familiar motions of simply collecting a bunch of stuff, though that is one of the things you can enjoy doing. In addition, you’ll be able to tackle some defensive challenges where you’ll need to use a combination of your base skills, environmental traps, and even some wild weapons at some point to thwart incoming waves of enemy cats. There are also various mini games and challenges you’ll be able to enjoy peppered about, testing different skills like your shooting in particular. In general, if you’re inclined to explore and just enjoy the different things to do, this can be fun.

That said, in terms of overall structure this doesn’t have all that much. Yes, you’ll generally have someone you’re supposed to talk to that will point you to a mission, and over time you’ll get rewards of some new abilities, but there’s not much purpose to drive motivation. Perhaps it’s the more kid-friendly vibe of everything, but what can be seen as simply letting you enjoy doing what you’d like at your leisure can also deflate interest by not throwing on some cool story beats or elements to punch up the experience. This is by no means a bad game, and for what it offers it plays reasonably well, even providing a more-than-average variety of tasks you’ll need to take on. I just wish there was something to help it be more exciting.