Pix the Cat is described by the developer on their website as 'an intense arcade game' and after playing I can't help but agree with their assessment.
This game was released last month as a free title for PlayStation Plus subscribers with a retail price of $17.99. Pix the Cat was created by a French developer, Pastagames, on the cusp of being a 15 year veteran of the industry, having made nearly two dozen games in that time span on a variety of platforms such as the DS and, obviously, the PlayStation Vita.
I believe that the best thing that Pix the Cat has going for it is the atmosphere it creates while you're playing. I can't quite figure out how to describe it past saying its just so much fun to experience.
Upon opening the game you're greeted with a large, exuberant cat, which never fails to make me smile, with cute little ducklings on one side and silly looking skulls on the other. (Seen above)
Go a step further to the main menu and you're met with a selection screen being on a TV with a cat facing it, sitting in a room with various features like a big cat rug, wooden duckies, and other such things. (Seen below)
If you decide to partake in Arcade Mode you can pick from a variety of voices (if you've unlocked them) to be your narrator for events, such as the default 'Lord Doom' and my favorite 'The Witch Doctor'. You can unlock a variety of others as well.
Once you play the game, you'll quickly understand that Pix the Cat's gameplay is completely centered around completing puzzles and eventually mastering them, if you like a challenge this is a game for you, no question about it. It provides you with three ways to test your mental fortitude: the aforementioned Arcade Mode, a Laboratory Mode, and a Nostalgia Mode.
Should you achieve a high enough score in Starter you'll unlock the Main board. Should you get a high enough score in Main you'll unlock Daily. I'm honestly clueless as to how to unlock the fourth option, Dessert. Let's just put it this way: I am #130 on Starter, #983 on Main, and have made it to the Top 10 in Daily. All of this has happened and I have not unlocked Dessert. At this point I am confident that I shall never be admitted into its hallowed halls. I've resigned myself to this fate.
You advance in any of these modes by collecting all the eggs on a given level and taking newly hatched ducklings to circles placed around the game map. Simple, right?
You need to plan and plot carefully your movements. Should you not, you'll find your game coming to a close with disappointment and more quickly than you thought. If the tail of your ducklings happens to trap you, you'll be prevented from moving for a short period of time and then all the ducklings you've collected will disappear. You'll also be whacked with a hit to your cat's speed. If you collected all the ducklings prior to being caught, you'll have to make your way to the next level. If there were some left, you need to make your way over to them and finish the level to advance. Basically, an occurrence like this ends the game for you. You need to restart as there is little sense in carrying on.
You only have a set amount of time, 3 minutes on Starter for instance, to get as far as you can while collecting the most points, so you can understand why there is no point in continuing. Your rhythm is not only gone, you've missed out on a significant amount of points and wasted a bundle of time.
If you deliver a duckling before you have collected them all, you'll be knocked with a subtraction from your speed, this obviously impairs your ability to get through the map as speedily as you could be. It'll also eliminate the possibility of getting a 'Perfect' score on the board. These Perfects are very valuable to you as they can give you more points than you earn by dropping off all the ducklings with no bumps along the way or not..
In case this didn't sound daunting enough, there's more!
You'll meet plenty of new friends along the way, like the the fiery skulls that inhabit the deeper levels of the game. These skulls are, in most cases, decent in number and high in annoyance factor. You'll need to gameplan for them, paying as close attention to their movements as you can and adjusting accordingly. You can use your tail to your advantage in dealing with them as the tail stops them dead in their tracks. They'll only resume movement once the last duckling has passed.
Not only will you have enemies like these working against you, the environment will become a foe as well. On many a level you'll be met with a piece of the map that'll automatically send you in a shot off in a direction you probably don't want to be headed in. You'll know these spots as they'll have a distinct point. You'll need quick reflexes to avoid them as your collecting eggs or to minimize the consequences of touching one.
One of the neat features of Arcade Mode I almost forgot to mention is how you can have a scoreboard sensei and be a scoreboard sensei! Your scoreboard sensei is the person immediately above you on the leaderboard. If you play with a scoreboard sensei you'll see their ghost on the map as you're playing. You may be able to learn valuable tricks to improving your run times from something they do, so its worth giving it a try once or twice as you're climbing the rankings. Every fraction of a second saved goes a long way to helping you along on your journey.
Laboratory Mode tosses over 20 different puzzles at you to complete. While you have an unlimited amount of turns to finish off one of these, you have a very limited, the exact number depending on the mission, amount of moves to achieve a 'Bonus' which means that you completed the mission 'par for the course'. I don't quite know how the par was determined, but you'll need your wits about you to get it, I guarantee it.
Nostalgia Mode has 70 missions in it and features a similar scoring structure to Laboratory mode. You have unlimited turns with which to complete any, but only X amount to save a poor little flower from being eaten. It also features radically differently gameplay. One mission will find yourself controlling three characters! Another will have you running in and out of portals to catch eggs as they appear.
Each mode also has a variety of in-game achievements to master, separate from the trophies the games provide. There are 54 in total with arcade mode netting the most with a whopping 38 and the other two splitting the remaining 16 getting 8 apiece.
I'm sure you realize this by now given how in-depth I've gone into explaining various elements and my high leaderboard scores that obviously weren't just gotten with a couple minutes of playing, but in case you didn't infer it:
I REALLY enjoy Pix the Cat.
Go play it.
Now.
If you had PS+ and claimed it, you really have no excuse to not give it a fair shake.
The $17.99 price tag presumably and understandably will turn some people off of it though. That prices it among the top 10 most expensive Indies on the Vita, actually. I know if I didn't get the game from PS+ and was merely looking at it as a new release on the store I would have never dreamed of paying that amount of money for it. I just own too many games as it is, buy too many other games on sale, and have PS+ giving me a constant stream.
Undeniably the amount of content justifies the purchase if you werplay it and enjoy it, but whether you enjoy it is something to be determined.
I say unless this game sounds incredibly intriguing to you from what I've told you about it and what you've seen from the screenshots provided, hold off for a sale. It's really is a hard price to swallow when you just can grab PS+, which it was on, for $50 and gain a lot more content overall over 12 months than even this game can provide.
0 comments:
Post a Comment