Catlord

Genre: Top-Down Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Catlord is a Top-Down Arcade-style Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2023, and I’ll just cut right to the chase – This is the game you get when someone tries to recreate the success of Vampire Survivors without understanding anything about what made Vampire Survivors work.

For those who are unfamiliar with Vampire Survivors, that game is a Top-Down Arcade-style game and Roguelike that popularized what is being called a “Bullet Heaven”-style game, the polar opposite of the “Bullet Hell”-style game – where Bullet Hell games have players weaving through a screen filled with enemy gunfire, Bullet Heaven games have you automatically spraying massive hordes of enemies with your own gunfire as your attacks become more and more impressive due to partly-randomized power-ups, with the enemy horde similarly increasingly more dense and tougher, and the player trying to fend off those enemies for as long as possible.

By contrast, you’ll note that I don’t call Catlord a Roguelike, as there are no significant power-ups to be found while fighting enemies. I would also strongly oppose any attempt to describe this game as a “Bullet Heaven” – your character shoots out a steady stream of bullets, but your attacks never become even remotely as impressive as you can get just a few minutes into a session of Vampire survivors.

To be fair, players can power-up their character in-between rounds using currency earned while playing. However, these upgrades are so slight that you’ll strain to notice a difference, even when you upgrade the same trait multiple times. Also, in addition to your standard attack, players have access to a temporary shield ability and a more powerful attack they can activate with the press of a button at the cost of some mana (refilled via pickups), and you also have a jump move that you can use to pounce on enemies or escape from danger, at the cost of some stamina (which refills over time). These additions are nice, but do little to counter the main problems this game has.

Unlike the best Bullet Heaven-style games, Catlord absolutely fails at making the player feel empowered. This combined with repetitive brainless enemies that just make a beeline for the player means that you’ll just end up going in circles fending off enemies as long as you can until their numbers and toughness overwhelm your current upgrade levels, resulting in you falling to the mob. Then go and upgrade your abilities, and head back into the game to do the exact same thing and perhaps last a little longer.

The presentation doesn’t help this game stand out either. The 2D pixel art visuals work well enough for the gameplay here, but neither your anthropomorphic cat character nor the hordes of enemies, nor the areas you fight them in are particularly distinct in any way. And while the energetic synthesized music is pretty decent here, it’s not enough to save this otherwise pointless game.

However, possibly the most incredibly tone-deaf thing about Catlord is its price – at $15, this game is priced at three times Vampire Survivors’ standard price! of course, we all know why this is – it’s to trick people into thinking they’re getting a good deal when the game frequently goes on sale for just a few bucks. Trust me when I say, you are not.

In the end, Catlord is a shameless, oblivious, ill-advised attempt to cash in on the popularity of a far, far better game, and it shows no understanding of why that game was popular to begin with. And at the insulting price this game is selling for, there is absolutely no one who should buy this game.

tl;dr – Catlord is a Top-Down Arcade-style game that is a pretty pathetic attempt to try to cash in on the popularity of “Bullet Heaven”-style games like Vampire Survivors without having any sort of understanding of what makes those games work. Not only is this a terrible copycat game, but it is also one that is priced at three times what Vampire Survivors sells for. This game’s creators are counting on you being a mindless fool they can trick into giving them money. Don’t.

Grade: D-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Laziest Copycat, Most Overpriced ($15)

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