Inside Social Games

Cute Catz is a kitten adoption application from the developers of Pet Pupz, Matt Beswick and Nicola Borchard. The premise is simple: you adopt, name, and train an adorable kitten (represented in picture form).

In Cute Catz, your kitten has two basic needs: food and attention. You have a certain number of credits that you can use to buy him/her kitten food, milk, mice, etc. You can also train the kitten using a scratching post or you can play with them or give them toys to make them happy. The training becomes helpful when you enter your kitten in little kitty beauty pageants and tree-climbing competitions against your friends.  Aside from naming your cat, you can list their likes and dislikes. My cat likes mice, string, and the early works of Thomas Mann

The game play isn’t much to brag about right now, and doesn’t require much in the way of strategy and skill. However, the developers make frequent posts on the homepage and seem very dedicated to making the game better. They’re releasing new breeds, creating a “breeding” feature, and are trying to differentiate the application from its dog cousin.

The game still needs depth and something that will keep players coming back day after day. After several days with the application, my kitten was always doing ok and no matter how many times I trained/played with/and fed it, it couldn’t win a competition. So the game may have some balance issues too, but like a kitten, it’s in its awkward stage.

As it stands, this a fairly standard social game not unlike Armies or Vampires. You can invite your friends and get credits or win competitions against random opponents or your friends. The game could include some basic Flash animations to make the kittens more lifelike and interactive, but this is a good start. Still, it has a long ways to go before it can compete against the big applications.

Game play: 4

Development: 6

Cuteness: 7