TactiCats

My first thought booting TactiCats was 'okay, another Brawlhalla-adjacent party brawler.' Then a giant laser pointer knocked me off a platform, a cheese cannon finished the job, and a yarn ball killed me on respawn. Fair enough. TactiCats is a top-down, pixel-art arena brawler from solo developer HungryDingo, ported and published by Pineapple Works, and it commits hard to its one joke: cats beating the stuffing out of each other with absurd power-ups inside trap-filled stages. The pitch is simple. Four players, local seats or bots, four game modes, and enough chaos per round that nobody really knows who won until the scoreboard appears. The core loop runs on dodging, rolling, and blocking incoming hits while timing your own attacks and power-up grabs. Stages are where most of the personality lives. Moving cars, sudden blackouts, and swooping eagles drop in as environmental hazards that function almost like a fifth player actively trying to ruin everyone's plans. That layer of unpredictability is what separates a round of TactiCats from something completely forgettable. When the hazards sync up with a four-way power-up scramble the game hits a genuine party-game sweet spot. The movement feels readable at a glance, which matters when you are handing a controller to someone who has never played before. Full controller support covers Xbox, PlayStation, Pro Controller, and JoyCons, so whatever you have on the couch is probably fine. As a competitive shooter specialist I will be blunt about the online side of things: there is basically no competitive online layer here to speak of. This is a local-multiplayer-first product in 2025, and the community numbers reflect that. Steam shows only a handful of user reviews, the player count is thin, and I would not count on finding random online matches with any reliability. The bot system fills the lobby gap acceptably, so two people can still get a functional session going, but bots are bots. They read patterns, not people, and the chaos ceiling drops noticeably. The single-player draw comes from 40 Steam achievements and a growing kitten collection unlocked through tasks and secret challenges, which is a decent hook for completionists but runs out of runway faster than the core gameplay might suggest. The honest limitation of TactiCats is scope. Four game modes sounds reasonable on paper but the game is built for a very specific social situation: people physically in the same room, a little competitive, not too serious. There is no ranked mode, no meaningful progression system beyond the cat collection, and no depth to reward repeat solo sessions. For a shooter audience used to gear systems, TTK tuning, and ranked queues, this is going to feel skeletal. That is fine, it just needs to be said. The Godot-built engine runs clean and the pixel art is sharp enough. There are no performance complaints to flag, which at this scale you would hope for. If you have three friends on the couch looking for something to fill the gap between Pummel Party rounds, TactiCats earns its spot for a session or two. If you are buying it expecting a solo or online competitive experience, the content will dry up fast. Treat it like party-game DLC for an evening that already has the right people in it.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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