Much like a band or singer-songwriter looking to shake things up and explore new aural delights for a third album, Cat Quest 3 takes to the high seas in search of a refreshing change of pace after a pair of medieval fantasy adventures. This time, the punniest action RPG out there is all about pirates and a quest of legendary booty of the North Star.
There’s a fresh tale of predestination and prophecies in Cat Quest 3, with the opening cutscene showing the Pi-Rat King sinking a ship on the open waters, with the only survivor being a kitten in a wicker basket. That little kitty is discovered by the spirit of Captain Cappey, who shepherds you through to adulthood and then journeys with and encourages you on your adventure of piracy across the Purribean. The good and honourable kind of piracy, though, where you’ll still deliver mail between NPCs and not just terrorise shipping lanes.
Of course, since you’re now a pirate, that means you’ll spend a fair amount of time on a ship of your own, which adds a new layer to the action RPG battling you’ll still find on land. It’s a nice, albeit light, change that still feels very much in keeping with the on-land action, though the ship has a distinct turning circle and momentum, and you’ll have to manage its own set of upgrades.
While it’s perfectly in keeping with the rest of the game, I did wish for a little more depth to the ship combat though. Your cannons auto-aim within an arc before you, instead of having broadside batteries like you might expect, so it actually feels more like you’re dogfighting in planes instead of ships – strangely, even the most basic enemy ships have full 360º aiming. It’s also a pain that you can’t repair your ship without it first being destroyed, which you have to swim next to in your life preserver for a few moments to restore. Racing away to get back to a little jetty and summoning your ship just brings it back to you in the same condition, so where you have a spell to heal up your kitty between rest point cat naps, it’s the ship is more restrictive feeling.
Of course, the bulk of the action still takes place on land – which still has the same kind of scale as a traditional RPG overworld – and this is a solid iteration on the previous two games. You now have a main melee weapon with a secondary gun or wand to switch to (as opposed to swapping characters) and can equip up to four magic spells, with spell slots being charged up by your regular attacks.
It’s all nice and simplistic, and allows you to focus more on the enemies that you’re facing and dodging their attacks, whether it’s a pi-rat butt stomp, a hog charge attack, swooping bird or various elemental enemies. While it’s hardly Dark Souls difficulty, the combat’s got some claws to watch out for and I personally found it can be deceptively easy to get carried away and take a lot of damage. Boss battles all feel nice and distinct, and will often push you in a new direction, whether that’s making use of elemental weapons or leaning more on ranged attacks and magic – if ever I was taking the wrong approach to an enemy, a few deaths would have me buck up my ideas!
The loot you gather on your adventure is kept simple and to the point. There’s a menagerie of different hats and armour, as well as a variety of swords, axes, shields and guns, but instead of Diablo-esque loot where everything has different stat rolls, once you’ve got something, it can stay with you through the full adventure. Pick up a duplicate and it will bump up the level of your existing gear, and if you feel you need a little bit more juice in your attacks, you can head back to the one main port in the game and throw money and magic crystals to level up anything you’ve got.
As in Cat Quest 2, all of this can be played in co-op, which is a nice and fun inclusion, though one I only dabbled with briefly while reviewing. It means you’ve got a little bit of slack in battle, as your buddy can come and pick you back up – just beware of getting hit while you’re stationary – and you can kit yourselves out with complimentary gear, and you’ll have to since you’re sharing an inventory. It does generally help to chop and change between different elements at times, so the ice wand lets you dodge through fire damage, while the shields are great for blocking rolling enemies and damaging them back. The main oddity in co-op is that you only get one ship,which is fine, but unusual when you can both control the same vessel.
You can quite quickly rattle through the main quest and story of the game, with your kitty chasing after the Pi-rat King, hunting down ancient keys and the like, but there’s a bunch of side quests like delivering mail, catching catfish, hunting down books, and optional dungeons with bounties to collect. All of the story is delivered with the same kind of pitch purrfect punning that’s positively pawesome, and there’s a good dose of foreshadowing for later twists, and callbacks to the overarching narrative of the series.
