Fancy Cats - Paws-itively mediocre
|
| Fancy Cats

Ordinarily, any game that featured dressing up cute cats would be a 10/10. No questions asked, no review needed, done, dusted, goodbye.

But in the case of Fancy Cats, it's less about adorable kitties and more about playing the same few levels of a match three game over and over.

It's repetitive and unoriginal, and banks too much on its cutesy charm at the expense of actually being fun.

Scratch your eyes out

The game is made up of two parts - playing with the cats, and playing a match three puzzle.

There's not much you can do with the cats. You can give them food to keep them happy, watch them play with each other, and put silly hats on them.

There's not just silly hats though, as you can also kit them out with silly glasses, a silly necklace, and some kind of silly back item.

But to get access to these dress-up items, you'll have to play the match three game, which is where the game starts to fall down.

Cat-astrophe

It's identical to just about every game of its genre, without some of the modern twists that make it more enjoyable, such as the ability to match a square of four objects instead of just a line.

And its difficulty level jumps between ridiculously easy to ridiculously hard so fast you'll get whiplash.

There's no big penalty for failure - you just don't get the items you've been working towards, and a new level will appear half an hour later.

Though success doesn't guarantee new clothes. You're more likely to get some food for the cats, or a toy for them to play with.

You can buy new items with coins that you earn through feeding your cats, but the rate at which you earn these coins is so slow that you'll give up that dream fairly quickly.

Cat pun

The one saving grace of the whole game is its cuteness. You can't deny that having cats firing off all over the place is adorable, and putting a straw hat on a kitten is comedy gold.

But overall, it's just no fun. There's only so many hats you can put on so many cats until the whole exercise feels pointless.

And if you're looking for a match three game to play, there's an App Store full of far better ones waiting for you to try.

It's a functional, paint-by-numbers puzzle game, but not nearly as fancy as the title implies. But it does, at least, have cats.

Fancy Cats - Paws-itively mediocre

Despite its appealing premise, Fancy Cats isn't particularly fancy, nor is it much fun
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.