Touch Pets Cats is the ngmoco‘s answer to the popular Touch Pets Dogs, a social game that lets you adopt your very own pet on the iPhone.
While based on the same premise of simulating a pet adoption experience, each game has its own idiosyncrasies. The biggest difference, aside from the pet choice of course, is the fact that Touch Pets Cats takes places almost entirely indoors.
The first time you open Touch Pets Cats, you have to sign into Plus+. It seems there’s no way around this, but once you sign in you’re good to adopt a pet. The adoption process lets you choose between five different types of cats, each with their own personality. You can choose between an affectionate tabby, an active Blue Russian, a finicky shorthair, and much, much more.
Every cat in the lineup is adorable, and Touch Pets Cats’ graphics are top of the line. It doesn’t get much better than this in the iPhone game arena. Once you get your cat home though, you start to realize just how much you’re going to have to invest in Touch Pets Cats to keep Mittens happy.
The game itself is founded on a few different objectives. The most important component is in keeping your pet happy. The happiness meter measures your performance in regards to your cat’s care (food, water, petting, litter box, grooming) play (chasing, scratching, hunting, agility, collecting), and social (socialization and friendship).
Each facet of this performance can be improved by interactive mini components that include everything from tilting your phone around to move a mouse or a bird, to feeding your pet by dropping a bowl of food onto the ground, cleaning the litter box, or brushing your kitten with a brush over and over again.
Whenever your cat experiences something positive he or she drops experience points onto the ground in starred looking badges. It’s your job to pick them up after your pet so you can move up in level.
Along the way you can improve your rankings by connecting with friends via social media, forming cat friendships, and socializing with others. Along the way you’re set into the tasks of completing a daily goal that gives you bonuses, and finding coins so that you can pay to decorate the house.
Because Touch Pets Cats is a social game, you’re probably wondering where the catch is. Well, it comes in two forms. The first is that you have to wait. You only have limited uses for every component in the game, so everything is up to the timing of Touch Pets Cats.
Also, coins take time to release themselves and your pet takes even longer to find them unless you feed your pet catnip. Catnip helps your feline find maximum coins, in turn helping you buy more furniture and virtual goods. It’s all one big circle, and buying either catnip or straight up coins will cost you anywhere from $1.99 to $99.
In the end, this game will keep you extremely busy. Taking care of your cat is practically a full time job, especially if you have to wait for what you need because you won’t spend money on the game. Also, after awhile I got tired of the monotony of everything. You mostly stay in your own house and everything ends up taking a little too long. Just grooming your pet with a brush, for example, takes stroke after stroke after stroke.
The graphics may be beautiful and some of your cat’s idiosyncrasies will be adorable, but unless you like the virtual pets scene, you probably won’t find yourself wrapped up enough to pay for the perks of Touch Pets Cats.
Bottom Line: Touch Pets Cats is wonderfully entertaining and adorable in the beginning. Meeting the goals and properly executing the game wears on you quickly though, and playing might just be more labor intensive than actually caring for a real pet.
