Grade: B
Feline Rampage Destruction Sim
Catlateral Damage is a first-person timed destruction game. You are a house cat, and your goal is to wreck your person’s house. This furry friend has X number of minutes to knock Y number of objects to the ground in each level. There is a litterbox mode, a campaign mode, and a vast number of cat puns everywhere.
Kids will love this game
On the first level, I knocked over a TV and destroyed a living room. Towels, bowls, plates, flowers, books, CDs, DVDs, none of them matched against my feline wrath!
Soon though, I got tired of the game’s gimmick. There are some power-ups and additional cat avatars you can unlock, but nothing you find is earth-shattering or particularly interesting. Maybe in my dull adult brain, I was thinking about how I’d have to clean up after the devilish creature. It took just 15 minutes for my experience to evolve from destruction enjoyment to being bored.
Certainly, I was not the target audience for the game, though. Catlateral Damage is more geared towards kids. My two kids, 9 and 11, thought this game was the best thing since grilled cheese and tomato soup. It was like they were on catnip and laughed maniacally, knocking every single last object to the ground. Perhaps in real life, all kids want to do is run around and destroy things. If not for us boring adults, they could go full madcap crazy around the household.
A potential seasickness generator
My own experience varied widely from the kid’s ecstatic enjoyment. As I played longer than 5 minutes, I soon felt a queasiness that just got worse. Something about the graphics made me seasick. Perhaps it was the lower resolution game, pastel colors, and cat perspective rolled together. As I thought about it, it was probably the jumping that triggered that feeling. When you jump like a cat, the screen camera moves very quickly and jerkily.
Or, maybe it was the music. I honestly came to hate the cheery tune that played on repeat after three or four minutes. If ever there was a song to make me sick, that was it.
When you feel sick playing a game, then something isn’t quite right. This seasickness feeling ramped up yet another notch when you enter the Disco event, and party lights are swirling everywhere. That was the final straw for me. I had to turn it off.
While I didn’t enjoy Catlateral personally to any great extent, I’m glad I could see it from a child’s perspective. If you didn’t before, you know now a game exists that can meet all of your feline destruction fantasies.
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