In this post, I am going to review a virtual pet simulator app game called Cattery. I guess you already understand from the game’s title that this game is about playing around with cats, and quite a lot of them as you are going to see pretty soon.
In this game, you can deploy adorable cats into the real world. You start wit ha cute little white kitten and you have the option to unlock six more kittens that can join the party. To unlock each can you’ll have to watch a full-screen commercial. You can skip it in middle, but you won’t get your cat.
The gets have their own pre-defined animations which they do every now and then but you can interact with them by feeding them with a bowl of fish (that looks like a real bowl of with fish residues in it. You can also whistle to them and they’ll come to you eagering for some petting and attention. Well, that’s about it, oh, and there is an option to turn the background music on and off.
As you can see, there is nothing particularly interesting here. Having said that, the game does have its charm. For example, I really like the cats’ look and I think the textures are taken from real cat pictures. I also really like the miaow sounds that they make (my cat loved it) and the ability to deploy as many cats as you want by just tapping on the screen—This game is called “Cattery” for a reason.
Another neat feature is the option to press the camera button to take a snapshot of your virtual cats in their new environment. I really enjoyed it because it makes it’s more convenient compared to using the On/Off button with the home button. My main issue with it is that it captured a snapshot of the user interface and I honestly don’t understand why the developer didn’t remove the UI. When you take a snapshot of virtual reality, the whole idea is to capture a scene where the virtual seamlessly blends in with the real world, and the last thing I want in that picture is given it a look like a mobile app or a videogame.
Let’s take a look at some gamepaly shall we?
Also, one thing that I noticed is that the developer brighten the screen to make the environment more childish, pure and cute and indeed, pictures taken with that app looked really nice. I didn’t need to do anything in Photoshop, they just turned out really nice.
The game does have some issues, quite a lot to be honest. I’ve noticed some graphics glitches around the cat and the food bowl. The cat’s movements are tacky, jittery and floaty. There are even worse issues, like when I take a photo, sometimes it resets the app, so all the cats are just gone and I need to restart the app. It happened to me more than once that watching an ad caused the app to crash. It was just once no problem, but it happened several times. It also happened that the game crashed when I spawned like 20 cats. Maybe the app just couldn’t handle all those Miaows and decided to close itself 🙂
I have a very mediocre AR experience with this ARKit app. Cattery does have its fun moments and I’m sure kids will love playing with it. If you love cats, you can also check out Miaow, another ARKit virtual pet simulator. The thing is that I got to see other augmented reality virtual pet apps that a better job than this app, like Follow Me Dragon and AR Dragon. I think that with those type of games, quantity is less important. It’s better to focus on a single character and perfect its animations and interactions. That being said, if you love cats and you want a pet simulator app where you can deploy tons of cats, you might want to try this game out.