Welcome to the crazy world of Mewgenics, where you will be breeding cats and taking them on crazy adventures. This is a roguelite with a turn-based tactical combat system from the team that brought you The Binding of Isaac. Let’s jump in and see if this one is worth checking out.
You live in a small town with some very weird neighbors. A very mad scientist, who seems to be obsessed with cats, asks you to start breeding them to build him an army. It turns out that the whole town is cat crazy and people want to start trading you things for your mutated cats. Some of them have very specific requirements.
In Mewgenics, you will spend the majority of your time in one of two places. The first is at your house and the second is on adventures. Let’s talk about your house a bit. Then, we will go into what your adventures might look like and how the combat system works.
At your house, you will be able to manage your cats and how they interact with each other. The happier they are, the more likely they are to make new kittens. You can make the cats happy by decorating your place with various items that you can get from one of your neighbors. The kittens can inherit skills and mutations from their parents. This can make for some very interesting combinations.
The cats that you are not using for breeding can be handed out to your neighbors. Each neighbor has a specific requirement for the type of cats that they want. Like if the cat has any injuries or if they have been to a specific location when they were on an adventure.
Each cat can only go on one adventure, so don’t feel too bad about giving them away to your neighbors. Your house would start to get really crowded otherwise. Plus, giving the cats to your neighbors is how you unlock additional content, such as more character classes for your cats.
Once you are done breeding and trading cats around the neighborhood, it’s time to take some of your cats on an adventure. As I mentioned before, your cats can only go on one adventure each. That means you are going to need fresh kittens that are at least two days old or some strays that you picked up wandering around outside the house.
Before you can go on an adventure, you will need to select a class for each of your cats and equip them with any items you might have on hand. There are over ten character classes in Mewgenics with 75 unique abilities for each class. This creates a lot of variety and means you will never have two runs exactly the same. Especially since you have to take new cats with you each time.
The map that you follow on each adventure is mostly linear, with the exception of branching off down the hard path about halfway through each location. The battles do ramp up quite a bit when taking the hard path, but typically, the rewards are worth it. There are over 900 items in the game. This means you are likely to continue to find a handful of new items each run, especially if you are taking the hard paths to get the more rare items.
While following the path of your adventure, there are a handful of different nodes you will come across. There are events, items, shops, combat, and boss combat. The events will pick a random cat from your party. Then, you will have to pass a stat check based on the cat that was picked for that event. Failing an event can have minimal cost, but it can also curse your cat with a negative effect that can hinder your whole adventure.
Item nodes are pretty simple and just give you a random item at that location. Shops typically have three items that you can purchase. One of which is a rare candy that will randomly level up one of your cats. This is always worth it if you have the spare coins.
Combat nodes will look to test your tactical awareness as much as your ability to strategize. Every combat seems to bring a new challenge, whether it is a boss fight or not. The farther you get with each adventure, the more surprises you will find in combat.
Combat is turn-based, with the order based on the speed of each unit. The order can be found on the timeline at the top of the screen. Although the order doesn’t change, some enemies, like bosses, will often go more than once before the end of the round. So, make sure you are keeping an eye on the timeline to know who will be going next.
Mewgenics has over 200 enemies and bosses. This means you will continue running into interesting and creepy new enemies as you progress through the game. You will run into everything from gnats to giant cats to piles of poop that throw poop at you. Not only is there a wide variety of enemies, but they also all act very differently. You will want to look at each unit at the beginning of combat to figure out what they do and your best strategy for dealing with them.
Your cat can take quite a bit of damage during an adventure. There are items and even a character class that can heal them. If they do happen to get knocked out in combat, though, they are not out for the count. They will come back at the end of the combat with an injury. These usually have a negative effect on one or more of the cat’s stats.
At the end of each combat, one random cat in your party will level up. At each level, you will unlock a new skill, a new passive, or a stat increase. These skills and passives are pulled randomly from the pool of unique abilities for that cat’s class. This means that you can end up with a completely different party dynamic each adventure, even if you took the same four character classes each time.
Mewgenics encourages you to experiment and find new abilities and mutations. With over 200 hours of gameplay, you will have plenty of time to try new things and see if you can create the ultimate cat combos. Hopefully, they are enough to take down even the craziest of enemies you come across.
With all that being said, I think that Mewgenics is a game that people are going to put a lot of time into. Not just because it has a long campaign, but because it is a fun and entertaining game. There are so many unique enemies and interesting abilities, you are bound to find something new every time you go on an adventure.
The game is quite odd and quirky. If that’s not your cup of tea, you might still be interested in checking this one out if you are a big turn-based tactics fan. There is so much depth to the tactical combat. With so many different enemies to come across, you will always find a new challenge to conquer.
If you are interested in checking out the game for yourself, head on over to their Steam page. The game is out now. See what sort of strange mutations you can create.
A review key was provided by the developers Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel.
