Cat Stacks Fever review - Can kitties revitalise the game of solitaire?

It's pretty easy to see the appeal of sticking a cat into a game – the very presence of a feline is enough to make even the level-headed gamer go wild.

Sadly, in the case of Cat Stacks Fever: Twitch Solitaire, even a kitty in a tuxedo can't save it from being an overly-repetitive, ultimately shallow experience.

It's core gameplay is fun for a few hands, but even with a slow drip-feed of new content, it never seems to really get going.

Cat Stacks Fever is all about playing a stripped-back version of solitaire, very, very quickly, and scoring as many points as you can in the process.

The controls are incredibly simple – you tap the deck to draw a card, then tap the card to place it on one of four spaces on the board.

You'll start with kings, and you'll then need to place a queen of the opposing colour on top of that, and so on and so forth until you get an ace and clear that pile.

What makes this tricky is a timer at the bottom that speeds up after card you put down, starting off at a pleasant pace before rapidly reaching incredibly stressful levels.

There's no way to slow this down, and it eventually gets to fast that your failure is inevitable, leading to an overwhelming feeling that there is no way to progress past a certain point in the game.

But until then, what you can play is pretty fun. It's straightforward enough that you can pick up and play in no time, and the rounds are relatively short, allowing you to rapidly jump back in once you lose.

Play enough rounds and score enough points and you'll eventually unlock new cards that get thrown into your deck, providing unique ways to screw you or save you.

There's a card that will randomly swap the placement of all your piles, completely messing with any system you may have in place, and a shield that will prevent this card from working or save you if the timer hits zero.

These add a neat diversion to the main gameplay, but they don't actually change much about how you'll play, and most of the time you won't even notice their presence.

And the act of unlocking them takes forever – you'll either have to be incredibly good or incredibly patient to get access to even half the cards available, and chances are you'll be neither.

You can't fault Cat Stacks Fever for trying something new though, and its attempt at revitalising the game of solitaire is admirable.

It's fast-paced fun that you can pick up for a few short bursts, but it won't take too long before you start to grow weary of its basic gameplay.

Throw in some incredibly grindy unlockables and you've got a shallow experience that takes too long to get going without much to draw you in initially anyway.