Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest

Genre: Turn-Based RPG / 3D Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!

The Warrior Cats series, or Warriors as it’s sometimes called, started out as a young adult novel series in 2003, and apart from an official Roblox game based on the property, Clans of the Forest marks the first time this franchise has received its own videogame, with this release in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2 letting players to create their own cat character within one of the four cat clans of ThunderClan, RiverClan, ShadowClan, and WindClan, with each clan getting their own story within the game.

The premise of this game’s world is much like our own, told from the perspective of these feral pets, who fight to protect their territory from the other clans, hunt for food and plants to use for healing and other things, and call the humans “two legs”, which they see as a mysterious threat. They have their own mythologies, their rituals, and so on. Also, they meow and make cat noises a lot.

Players traverse the world of Warrior Cats largely as a 3D Platformer, climbing trees to get past taller obstacles and exploring the game’s fairly large map as they gather resources and stalk enemies and prey. Upon attacking or being attacked by another animal, the game transitions into a more traditional Turn-Based RPG battle, where players have a sort of “paper-rock-scissor” system of three different types of attacks that change the cat’s stance, with each stance being strong against one type of attack and weak to another.

So first, I’ll start with what I do like here. The worldbuilding is outstanding, really giving you the feeling that these mangy feral cats have constructed their own society based on their perspective on the world, with their own internal and external struggles with other cat clans. And the world itself is dense and visually-interesting, really giving depth to that excellent worldbuilding.

The problem is, at nearly every turn, this game seems to be doing something to frustrate me, to the point where I wonder if the game is actively trying to get me to stop playing it.

Navigation through the game’s environments is exhausting, as you often can’t just go from point A to point B, but must figure out the proper path by trying to climb trees and seeing where the labyrinthine connections of jumps from branch to branch take you. Early on it becomes clear that you really need to grind to not be demolished by early roadblock enemies. Healing items are either largely ineffectual or, for actual effective healing items, rare. You can buy them at a shopkeeper, but the game uses a barter system that requires you to seek out multiple specific items to trade for the one(s) you want. The game pushes players to use stealth to sneak up on enemies, but that stealth isn’t very well-crafted. Players unlock abilities the game doesn’t tell you how to use, and barter shops offer equipment items without being clear that they’re aesthetic-only.

However, the biggest issue, at least on Nintendo Switch, is the presentation and performance. Right from the start, this game absolutely chugs, and at times I wonder if it’s dipping into single-digit framerates. It’s not always that bad, but it’s bad often enough that it makes playing this game thoroughly unpleasant. Clearly the game’s lush, densely-packed natural environments are the major contributing factor here, but I don’t even feel like they’re visually-impressive enough to be worth the hit to performance.

Unfortunately, the sound has issues too. This game’s soundtrack is oddly subdued and annoyingly repetitive, often sounding akin to a dreamy music-box lullaby playing on ten-second repeat. It may fit the game’s somewhat fantastical nature, but runs completely counter to the adventurous themes of the game, and in particular it undermines the atmosphere of danger posed by the forces threatening your cat clan. And you’ll get sick of hearing the game’s small number of cat sounds repeated over and over again, too. This game does have voiced narration for its story cutscenes, but outside of that the game is oddly quiet apart from the annoying sounds I mention above.

If you’re a fan of the Warrior Cats series who has been waiting since 2003 to see this series realized as a videogame, I still think you may enjoy this, as it does seem to be genuinely trying to honor the worldbuilding those stories featured. But for most RPG players, I think they’ll find this game to be a thoroughly unpleasant ordeal, one built from a great concept, but one that at every turn seems committed to making this experience unlikeable. Oh, and for those wondering if the Nintendo Switch 2 version at least fixes the performance issues… sorry, I can’t tell you at this time – there’s no Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade path. But at least as far as the Nintendo Switch version is concerned, I do not recommend this one.

tl;dr – Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest is a Turn-Based RPG and 3D Platformer based on the young adult novel series about clans of feral cats. The worldbuilding elements here are wonderful, but the gameplay is so completely filled with frustrating elements that I cannot give it a recommendation, especially with such horrendous performance on Nintendo Switch. Unless you absolutely adore the books this game is based on, don’t bother with this.

Grade: C-

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^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, Seth Christenfeld, and Vince Verrinoldi. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}