Undercat [Review]
Undercat is an espionage-esc objective-based platformer where the protagonist, Chips the Dog, tries to bring peace to his home by rebelling against their cat dictator. This pixelated and colorful game was both published and developed by SparkyTailGames. The game is small and can easily be beaten in its entirety within about three hours. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and is reminiscent of older 2D platformers that aren’t extremely long.
The best feature is that the entire game is co-op. This makes the experience all the more enjoyable as you can have a friend help you. The game also doesn’t make the co-op annoying or difficult, the screen will continue to pan out as the two players get further from each other. Most levels aren’t big enough where the screen can’t pan out enough but in the case this does happen one player will be teleported to the other.
As mentioned before, you play as a dog which means you have the abilities of one as well. When crouching you start to sniff the area, causing scent trails to appear that will lead you to your objective. Most of the time the objective is to find objects like bones or gears. Sniffing them out and following the trails you’ll be able to dig them out of the ground and bring them back to your rebel base. Other levels will have you rescuing animals that have been captured and/or enslaved by the mind-controlling dictator. There are also some collectibles that you can look for if you’d like to add a bit more gameplay. Often you will find them just from exploring the levels yourself but some can be hidden under or behind secret floors and walls that aren’t as obvious.
Another ability you have that’s less canine-related is that you can pick anything and (almost) anyone up and shake them down. Shaking things causes coins and health to fly everywhere. The coins are helpful as they act as your lives, every time you die you need ten coins to respawn. You can also use them to buy items at your base, things like health kits, bombs, or even boxes that you can use to hide in. This is more helpful than you’d think, when hiding in a box you don’t take any damage. It adds to the stealth aspect of the game. Or if you’d like, brute force is also an option! You can simply pick up enemies and throw them all in an area that you don’t need to go. The only enemies you can’t pick up are the big ones like lions and bears. I would be careful though as there were times we threw enemies down a random hole and then ended up needing to go there for an item or to escape.
The game did get a bit frustrating at a few points. The boss fights are the low points of the game. There aren’t too many but the first one, a fight against a giant robot cat, was frustrating as we couldn’t figure out what to do. For a while, we assumed we had to throw items on its head to damage it. Only to get annoyed that the solution was to simply hold a shard of glass while the robocat shot a laser at us so we could reflect it. The final boss fight also felt a bit lackluster and out of place. It didn’t help that only one person needed to die for the whole fight to restart. We had to increase our health bar from three hearts to more just to make it so we could last longer without annoyance.
The annoyance only started towards the very end of the game and shows that they knew when it was time for the game to end. I love when games are short and sweet and don’t try to extend the game just for the sake that they can. Undercat was fun while it lasted and ended just before it could become something to resent. If you like platformers or even just need a good game to play with someone for a sitting I highly recommend Undercat. The game is easy to play and can cater to two different styles of play, being both a stealth game or a brute-force mission. It’s versatile and fun and will be getting a 7/10 from me. Undercat is currently available on Playstation 4/5, Switch, and Steam.