Jumping Jazz Cats

I don't usually cover party platformers, but Jumping Jazz Cats landed on my radar because the movement system is more mechanically considered than the cartoon aesthetic lets on. The core loop asks you to grind handrails, swing from chandeliers, bounce off cushions, climb curtains, and chain those actions across six mansion levels inside the Ellington Estate. That's a real movement vocabulary, not just "run and jump." Whether the game gives you enough time to actually feel good at it depends heavily on who you're playing with and how full the lobbies are. The mini-game roster mixes cooperative and competitive modes. You've got Gimme Yarn, Fat Cat, and Cat Tree Capture as named modes, plus shadow cat versus lion-team showdowns that lean into asymmetric play. Each round can host 2 to 9 players online, and up to 4 locally via split-screen. The Jazz mechanic is the most interesting design choice: 10 original tracks are baked into the session, and their choruses actively influence round conditions. That's a genuine systemic wrinkle rather than a cosmetic layer, and it gives the mode-mixing more replay value than it would otherwise have. The developers at Le Catnip Collective also built a Solo Trials mode with timed challenges pulled from the multiplayer levels, which functions as both a training ground and a fallback when the servers are quiet. Here's the problem, and it's the same problem every small-studio party game faces post-launch: population. Community threads are already flagging near-empty lobbies outside peak windows. For a game built entirely around getting 9 cats into a room together, thin matchmaking is a structural weakness, not a minor complaint. If you can commit to playing with a dedicated friend group who will all buy in, the session-to-session variety holds up. Stranger lobbies are a gamble right now. The Steam review score sits at "Mostly Positive" but the sample size is small, and the texture quality bug on certain GPU configs is an unresolved gripe in the community. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5, which should mean visual headroom, but some players report low-res textures even at max settings. The movement animations were built from frame-by-frame cat reference footage and then pushed into "cartoony" timing to make inputs feel snappier. That decision is correct. The controls feel responsive rather than floaty, which puts it ahead of a lot of games in this space that mistake loose physics for charm. Character customization with unlockable accessories is present, and the cat creator gives you room to personalize without it being a gacha wall. If you care about cosmetics, there's enough here to tinker with between sessions. This is a genuinely charming small-studio first game with a movement system worth respecting, jazz-driven round modifiers that are more clever than they sound, and a local multiplayer option that could carry a couch session easily. The ceiling is a 9-player online session with people you actually know. The floor is a solo grind through time trials while waiting for lobbies to fill. Know which one you're buying for. Fred, Scout Team