Now, I didn’t know much about Mewgenics before I started playing the recent Switch 2 port. Obviously I knew it was some sort of cat tactics game that was from the creator of The Binding of Isaac, and I’d heard Lyle talking about how fantastic it was both on the podcast and in his glowing Mewgenics review, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how bloody brilliant it is. It seems to have found its natural home on Nintendo’s handheld hybrid too, so if you’ve been waiting for this version then you’re in for a (cat) treat.
For those who haven’t read much about the game, it’s a roguelike game where you breed a coterie of cats from the crack den you call a home, then you take those cats out on runs featuring tactics combat sprinkled with mini scenarios you need to make decisions on. It’s utterly compelling, and while I was a bit baffled by things at first, I’ve since found myself reaching for my Switch 2 any time I’ve got a free ten minutes.
Each run starts by putting together a team of four felines, checking their stats and picking those that are going to give you the best chance of success. You then pop a collar on them, which is the equivalent of assigning classes. One of my favourite bits is that the game automatically names your team based on its makeup, so you might be leading a team of strong lunks, or mangy sharpshooters. It’s a fun touch that makes each team feel unique.
You start with some fairly common classes, like fighters, tanks and mages but as you progress you unlock more varied options including cleric, thief and more. Each class comes with a mix of active and passive abilities that hurt enemies or help your team, and as you progress your run you’ll be able to level them up to unlock more. There are tons of combinations between active and passive skills, plus additional emergent conditions to manage, and every time I levelled up I’d have to really think about the options on offer to make sure I picked something that’d synergise with the rest of the team. My favourites were the passives that caused familiars or critters to spawn when you attacked, as they meant you’d build up an army of expendable fodder to draw enemy fire. These brave beasties saved my cat’s arses on multiple occasions.
Throughout the run you’ll land on combat tiles, which take place on a tactical combat grid. You’ll be fighting rats, bugs, fish and other cats, to name but a few, and combat is constantly kept interesting by throwing in modifiers. There may be a firestorm sweeping the alley you’re fighting through, which means every combat encounter is covered in flames. This can be a nightmare to deal with but also help you out in some very specific scenarios. You’re not always guaranteed to meet the same enemies at the same points on each run too, and while the smaller battles are fairly standard, you’re regularly interrupted by fights with boss characters that force you to think more about how you play, as you’re dodging bombs, bear traps or dealing with brutes with congenital heart conditions.
Your cats can each move, attack and use any number of their spells, provided they have mana, more of which is doled out after each turn. It means you never have rounds where you’re playing passively, trying to bank more mana, and instead you’re always on the attack (or helping teammates, if you’re the cleric). These spells provide a huge amount of variety, ranging from simply shooting enemies across the map to setting up bait, teleporting or performing more extravagant feats of magic.
At the end of each stage you can either choose to continue the journey with your current party or bring them home as conquering champions. This is an important decision to make, as once they’ve completed one excursion they can’t go back out again. At home your kitties will roam around the house, sleeping in the rafters or playing on their cat tower, and often neighbourhood cats will appear outside for you to adopt too. At the end of each day you’re treated to a little cutscene in which the cats either fuck or fight each other.
During the former, two cats will come together to produce a cute little kitten which should (hopefully) have the best of their combined attributes. This is why you’ll want to make sure your champions come home in one piece, as they’ve got active and passive skills to pass on, as well as base stats and, less positively, any mutations or physical injuries sustained in the field. This leads to a slow but steady loop of completing runs, coming home, breeding more cats that might be best suited to specific roles, before heading back out to try and take on the next area.
This was always the kind of game that’d play best on handheld, and it feels perfectly suited to the Switch 2 thanks to the pick up/put down nature of the console. It’s not something I’d assume is particularly taxing for the system, and I experienced no visual or technical issues whatsoever, it works perfectly. My only minor gripe is that the UI can be very busy when you’ve got four cats, half a dozen enemies, 7 familiars, debris and coins on the battlefield, and the battlefield itself is engulfed in flames. This, in turn, makes it easy to get a bit lost while navigating around the UI. Thankfully if you hold X it’ll show you a scaled back version which I found very useful, particularly in the more hectic battles.
We had a play on the XBOX version and the controller layout has been refined to make it more palatable with a controller than the original PC release. The fact you have quick resume and achievements means it’s very much as home on the Series X and S, and you feel less constrained to longer runs when you can just suspend and come back later. Like the Switch 2 version of Mewgenics, it still feels like there’s room to tweak the UI, but overall you can grab this one on any console and you’ll be very happy, assuming you like tactics games.
Mewgenics is a phenomenal tactics game and with the run-based structure I can easily see this becoming a “forever game” for those that love it. It’s one that I’m going to be dipping in and out of for a long time, and if it crops up during our GOTY proceedings this year I’ll definitely have more than a few words of praise for it.
