Space Cats Tactics Review

Released on the 24th of June, Space Cats Tactics is a turn-based tactics game in which you control a group of smuggler cats who are flying a spaceship. You command them while completing missions such as obtaining items, exploring systems, and fighting other spaceships. It is a story-driven game in which you unlock different levels by completing the previous ones.

The story of the game isn’t very interesting: you just get assigned a bunch of seemingly random missions that are barely connected. Although there is a story going on, it doesn’t feel that way most of the game; it just feels like there is no reason for doing what you’re doing and that you’re just mindlessly completing the missions you receive. The game is filled with annoying tasks (both which are and are not explicitly stated) that don’t add anything but lengthen the playing time.

Space Cats Tactics starts with a very weird situation that doesn’t make a lot of sense and was clearly made to act as a tutorial and nothing more. It feels out of place and also doesn’t really explain anything, as well as lasting a lot longer than a tutorial should. The entire game consists of fairly simple actions such as moving, attacking, and picking up objects that can be used later on or are required for a mission. There are also these short Dungeons & Dragons-like sections in which you are presented with a situation and are required to make a decision; most of the choices you can make throughout the game don’t really impact anything, nor are they important at any point.

The gameplay is what you usually see in turn-based tactics without some strategy additions. You find the best way to fight the enemies, and let me spoil it for you — it’s just shooting them at the beginning of your turn and then moving as far away as you can so as to not be shot at yourself. There are also power-ups you can receive and equip to boost some of your stats. There is a fire, intruder, and crew location system that exists in Space Cats Tactics as well. The first one makes it so a room in your ship can catch on fire, forcing you to move a crew member there to put it out before it spreads. The intruder system puts an alien on your ship that will fight your crew members. The last one is tied to the rest of them — it makes the location of your crew members inside the ship important; what you can do at any given turn depends on the rooms which are occupied by crew members. The game only has autosaving, and it happens so rarely that you’ll need to get through very long sessions of playing just to not have all your progress lost.

The graphics are pretty solid, especially for an indie game; they suit the genre and are nice to look at, although not anything super interesting. There are some effects which look very good and some that don’t. The laser beam looks amazing, although it’s pretty simple, and doesn’t have very much to it. On the other hand, spaceships shooting or exploding looks pretty awful and aren’t nice to look at.

The game has a huge sound problem that makes it a much worse experience. The sound effects aren’t awful, though they can definitely be improved a lot, and you won’t miss anything by just turning them off. The voice acting, though, is terrible — throughout most of the game, the voices are clearly acted and don’t convey any emotion, making listening to characters talk so tedious and annoying that, at some point, I just turned off the voices in settings. The music doesn't fit what is going on at all and is very anticlimactic; you're much better off just playing something on Spotify in the background.

Space Cats Tactics is so poorly optimised that running it is a nightmare. It is an indie game that barely utilises both the CPU and GPU, and yet it still crashes and freezes almost all the time. The loading screens take forever, and God forbid you switch tabs while it’s loading, as it will just freeze forever if you do. The game can also freeze for a little bit from some visual effects while still barely utilising the GPU.

Overall, the game is very bad. It isn’t interesting at any point and doesn’t hold up to any standard. The gameplay and graphics are the best qualities of the game and are both just a little more than fine. It is further ruined by engine and optimisation problems that make it unplayable unless you like staring at loading screens and the Windows prompt that tells you to either close the game or wait for it to unfreeze.