If you’ve ever succumbed to incessant adverts and played mobile games with ‘Merge’ in the title, then you might know what’s going on in Roofcats Band – Suika Style. Merge games have a wayward interpretation of Newton’s Laws: collide two identical items together and they produce another, much larger item. That item can collide with another, similarly huge item, and suddenly you’re the proud owner of a mega-item.
Roofcats Band – Suika Style has got two changes it wants to make. First, it wants you to swap items for cats. Or, more specifically, some cat faces. Think of a knock-off Aristocats, with each member of the band being smooshed into doppelgängers to create other members of the band. We can’t get clearer than that.
The second change is to turn the Merge games from mobile into something more akin to Tetris. Your cat-face can be dropped anywhere along the top of the screen, and it will thunk onto the cats below. Match a cat face and – ‘bling!’ – the cat becomes another, bigger feline. So yeah: Tetris, but instead of making lines you’re making catzilla.
A Tetris-a-like is nothing without combos, and Roofcats Band – Suika Style duly obliges. Two mini-cats can become a medium-cat, which is now snugly resting against another medium-cat. They become a super-cat, and so on. There are plenty of opportunities to watch the screen go brrrr.
Well, kind of. That’s the dream, but Roofcats Band – Suika Style is slightly too pedantic about whether one cat is touching another. If there’s the merest sliver of a half-pixel between two identical cats, then often a combination won’t happen. It sucks the joy out of things when you’re denied an almighty combo because two cats aren’t quite tesselating perfectly. It really didn’t need to be this particular.
There’s a sense that you’re never quite in control with Roofcats Band – Suika Style. Just as one cat pairing refuses to combust, suddenly another pairing will pop off. Why it popped will be unclear, as Roofcats Band – Suika Style dearly needs to slow down its animations so that it can say “look, you did something good!”. Without an idea of what just happened, you can miss the sense of achievement. Like throwing actual cats into a pit, it can get a little too chaotic.
But there’s still a ragtag, fiddly fun to be had in Roofcats Band – Suika Style. While we could never say that we were in full control, there was still a place for its brand of chaos. Chucking a giant cat onto the screen can cause others to roll and jostle, which is where matches will happen. By accident, the game can suddenly become a sea of fireworks. Plus there are small moments of control: dropping a tiny cat into a gap between larger cats’ ears, nailing another tiny cat, is a great feeling. There are touches of Super Bust-a-Move in those moments.
Tastes will vary. For me, Tetris games are reliant on precision. If you don’t trust the game, that’s a critical problem. But my daughter pumped serious time into Roofcats Band – Suika Style, so clearly wasn’t as bothered. It was a toy to be tinkered with. And hey, it’s got cats. So she (nine years old, if that helps) would add a mark to the score. We’re not sure what you might make of that.
What is nicely handled is the additional game modes and highscore tables. Should you want, you can attempt to get the lowest score, not the highest. That might raise a frown, but it makes sense when you think about it. In a physics-based matching puzzle like this, NOT making combinations requires real talent. How can you create a mountain of cats without two identical cats touching? It’s not a question we thought we’d be asking ourselves, but it’s not got an easy answer.
And regardless of whether you go for low or high scores, there’s a global highscore table waiting for you at the end. It’s rather neat, not least because only a handful of people are playing Roofcats Band – Suika Style right now. Fill your boots: you can probably join us in the Top 100 without too much fuss.
The question is whether you will want to. Roofcats Band – Suika Style is a shabby, unruly little tomcat, and won’t do quite what you want it to. That makes sense when it comes to cats, but when you’re trying to enjoy a Tetris-style puzzle game, the lack of precision is harshly felt. We found ourselves wanting to nudge the screen like a pinball machine, urging two cats to touch each other.
Will you care about the lack of control as much as we did? That’s not something we can clearly answer, as our pre-teen kind of, sort of loved Roofcats Band – Suika Style. But we’re not giving it a pass. With some tightening up, this could have been supremely satisfying. But like a cat, it only obeys you half the time.
