Cat God Ranch – PS5 Review

This reviewer’s kid used to love this book by a writer called Julia Donaldson called What The Ladybird Heard, most of the fun of reading as a parent being really enthusiastic doing the animal noises. If you read a book to your kid in excess of twenty times, you make your own amusement. A little like Flanders & Swann’s rendition of the Greek children’s song To Kokoraki in that regard. So, upon first starting Cat God Ranch by Chinese studio Crazy Potato, we had fond flashbacks of many a bedtime reading.

Every time an animal does something, you get an animal sound to match. It’s all very jolly and family friendly, on the surface at least. Penned as a ‘super fun strategic roguelike” this has depth beyond a kids’ game.

The thing is, despite our four or so hours with Cat God Ranch, subtitled Age of Dinosaurs for the DLC that we’ve yet to be able to access, other than the menagerie of animals we’ve unlocked and the general very Chinese feel to the game, we still don’t really know what we’re doing. We suspect that it has its roots in mobile and not much resource has been given to translation outside throwing phrases at Google Translate and hoping for the best.

The tutorial, which has a glitched associated trophy, goes through the basic mechanics and not very much otherwise. It isn’t really much help. As opposed to the training levels on other games we’ve played. We didn’t really learn very much, nor pop the trophy. And with a post release patch having dropped a couple of days ago, it still hasn’t unlocked. We’re reminded of another game with very glitchy trophies, Pirates Outlaws, that remains forever stuck on one trophy for us. We’re resigned to it remaining forever a ghost in that regard.

You see, you can play through the first few levels without any real impediment and not really learn anything as you progress. You’re prompted by a black cat called Hei Zei, which depending on which search engine you prefer, either translates as Hey Gods or Black Thief. You’ll be bombarded with various ways that animals interact with one another. At the outset they’re simple enough, a hen reacts well in conjunction with a cockerel for example. Or a fox likes to eat chickens. Or that a dog will see off predators.

So far, so raft puzzle. Except Cat God Ranch adds so many mechanics that it left us in a state of bewilderment pretty early on. There’s two main currencies in the game, cat cans that are earned at the end of each day and little gold paws that are granted by carrying out the actions of the game. The former are useful, the latter are essential.

Cans let you buy items mid-game such as ponds, pastures, nests at the basic level, ranging through to various modifiers as you progress further. The little golden paws on the other hand, are required to pay tribute to the titular Cat God. In effect, rent. If you’ve got a decent economy ticking over, you’ll have the sufficient funds available to cover the offering and have a healthy surplus to work towards the next tribute.

As you progress, you’ll unlock different cat gods, which in effect act as modifiers with bonuses and buffs to gameplay. Quite how they useful they turn out to be, isn’t particularly clear on most occasions. There’s also cat toys that also provide bonuses. At least they’re a little more obvious in terms of function.

The menagerie of animals you unlock is large and varied, with hoofed animals alone being represented by a good thirty or so species. Most of the animals are what you might deem to be prey animals, though if you want to hit the heights you’ll need to engage with the predators in the equation. They range from the predictable fox through eagles, hyenas and eagles.

As you unlock the other species groups, additional predators become available too. It’s all well-presented but ultimately as much window dressing as the gameplay in our turd of the year Fast and Furious Arcade Edition. Cat God Ranch avoids the ignominy of that award at least, but it’s a close-run affair due to the laundry list of frustrations we’ve listed here.

As you populate your playfield, it’ll get more and more crowded at which point you’ll be grateful of the predators to thin things out a little. You can use any spare cans to get rid of some animals too, especially those that have a debuff when they are solitary, such as the badger. Part of the problem is you’re hoping that your animals are placed in an optimal position to get the necessary synergies, but due to the way the game places them randomly, it all feels like the arbitrary RNG is your biggest opponent sometimes.

We hit a big wall after a while where no matter how we tried, we couldn’t get past a certain stage. Yet after a week or so away, we revisited Cat God Ranch hoping that we’d make a little headway. We somehow got through by getting lucky with an extinction level bird (a cassowary?) that killed all other animals for 99 paws at a time. We managed to unlock the rodent animal family too. But beyond that, there’s very little impetus to continue.

The problem is, despite the jolly presentation, the jaunty music and the funny animal noises, Cat God Ranch isn’t much fun. If you prevail on a stage, it’s generally more through luck than judgement. The mechanics are so oblique and badly explained, that we suspect the only people who really know how to play it with any level of skill are the devs themselves. It’s not helped by some really unclear tooltips that might make sense in the original Mandarin Chinese, but any nuance or meaning is very much lost in translation here.

Hopefully someone well-meaning will eventually set up a wiki on the best strategies to unlock all that Cat God Ranch has to offer, but given the tools at your disposal within the game, you’re largely in the dark. We suspect that the pro-level strategies will be unearthed via the hardcore types on YouTube videos, but for now, there’s no real joy to be derived from playing this.

As a result, we struggle to recommend it, not for the glitchy trophies, more for the oblique game mechanics that aren’t well explained enough. Do yourself a favour and don’t go through the gate of Cat God Ranch for now, if ever.