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Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na BOX CAT!
Uh. Okay. So this game doesn’t have anything to do with Batman, or boxes. But there are cats!
Um, right. So what even is this?: It’s freaking BOX CAT, that’s what it is.
YES I KNOW YOU HAVE TOLD ME THIS. WHAT IS BOX CAT?: Oh. Good question. It’s sort of like… reverse Frogger, with cats. You slide the cat back and forth a busy street and instead of trying to avoid the cars, you try to hit them. Because you’re a cat, you are the master of the universe, and everyone and everything gets out of your way.
But why ‘Box Cat’?: Because the cat looks like a box. It’s pixel graphics, okay?
Is there anything else to the gameplay except for smashing cars?: A little, yes. You can dash, which you need to do in order to knock over the last car in every level, which is some kind of nuclear disposal vehicle or something. You can also collect coins from birds for points Every three coins you collect turns you into Super Box Cat, which is just a larger version of regular Box Cat. Aside from that, it’s basically a score attack style game with achievements, with each set of three achievements unlocking a new cat avatar to play as.
What are the controls like?: There are two options for controls: buttons, touch, and tilt. The button controls have the left and right directional controls on the left side of the screen and the dash button on the right side. The touch controls let you slide your finger back and forth to control the cat, while the tilt controls are pretty self-explanatory, using the phone or tablet’s accelerometer to control the cat. In both the tilt and touch controls, just touching the screen lets you use the dash attack. In practice, the button controls felt the best to me, as the tilt controls make the cat move too slow, and the touch controls never quite worked for me (though that may have to do with the screen protector I use on my Galaxy S4). Also, sometimes the dash attack was hard for me to activate at times when things on the screen were hectic. All in all, though, they are basic controls and work more or less the way you would expect them to.
This is a mobile game, so I have to ask: are there in-app purchases?: Well, yes, but there are only a couple of additional cat avatars that can be bought for less than a dollar. So it’s really not intrusive at all, especially considering that the game itself only costs a dollar on the Google Play store and two dollars on the Apple App Store (both as of 10/3/2013).
So would you recommend it?: For a game that is basically Burnout with cats? Definitely. I mean, it’s a simple arcade-style experience for a couple bucks, and it’s great for when you’re waiting in line for something. There are definitely far worse ways to spend a couple dollars!
