Preview | Catizens

LifeisXbox’s Catizens preview | Hello there! Today, we’re going to be talking about Catizens, a game by developer Bad Optics Games that is set to release later this year. Some of you may have already tried out Catizens during Steam Next Fest since a demo was made available throughout this digital festival. As you can probably deduct from the title of this game, it’s all about cats that are citizens in your own little town. You build it up from scratch and you go level by level. Let me tell you more about this little gem in the making, shall I?

Cat citizens

Inspired by RimWorld and The Sims, Catizens is a colony management simulation game where you watch over unique cats with quirky personalities, as you help them build and grow their settlement while exploring new lands, facing off against wildlife, and overcoming the challenges of each environment. You start off by creating two characters, both cats, of course. There are quite some customization options, and both the cats and the environments look quite good already. You can go to your settings menu if you want fantastic quality, but you can also play with the fast quality and a few other options in between. I think a game like Catizens already has the advantage that it’s about cats so that immediately makes it really cute, but even besides that, the art style is pretty cool!

What’s in a demo

The demo of Catizens is pretty fun to play so far. You get to choose between two difficulty settings, namely catual and catverage. There is also a third option (catlamity) but this one was not yet made available in the demo. Catizens offers an autosave option (which is always very important to me), and there are various levels to discover so far. You start with a small tutorial, and I have to admit, the controls and interface are well-designed. You’ll get the hang of how to play this game quite quickly, I’m sure. But managing your colony will prove to be a little harder. You get a few goals at every level, and once you reach these, you can either move on to the next level, or choose to stick around a little longer at the current level. I liked that you can stay at your level a little longer, because I just got attached to my cats, and I couldn’t take all of them with me to the next level, who sad!

New catizens apply (almost) daily, so you’ll need to provide enough housing. On top of that, you’ll need to gather resources, keep your catizens happy, fight off enemies, explore new territories, provide decorations, etc. Once one of my cats got fleas, I was kind of screwed though, because I didn’t really know what to do exactly. I think some extra information every now and then could be helpful in that regard.

Every cat has a certain look, typical strengths, and also traits like brave, animal lover, destructive, and so on. This also means that they will like or dislike certain things and might put in personal requests, which you will have to listen to if you want to keep your cats happy. Cats will also have certain ‘jobs’, which go together with their traits. My Maui cat was a fighter, while my Michael cat was more of a builder. Once you get a bigger camp and you have a lot of cats around, it’s easy to lose focus, so deciding to keep a closer handle on some of the more important cats might be your best shot. You can just get the rest of them to gather resources or something.

Bright future

I’m actually very excited about what I have seen from Catizens so far. It’s a fun game that manages to balance both exciting and relaxing gameplay, which I thought was pretty pawsome (come on, I had to insert at least one cat joke, right). I hope to see upgraded graphics, more levels, and additional decoration/building opportunities in the future, but I’m pretty confident Bad Optics Games will not disappoint with the full release of Catizens.