CATS: Crash Arena Turbo Stars review

CATS: Crash Arena Turbo Stars is a game that seems modeled off of the Robot Wars TV show and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. It's a game that lets you combine all sorts of random parts to create war machines to face off against other players doing the same thing. It's some fast multiplayer fun with a lot of potential, but it gets slowed down by its free-to-play elements.

The acronym for Crash Arena Turbo Stars is no accident. In addition to being a multiplayer robot combat game, it's also cat-themed. CATS starts out with your character–a cat–being introduced to their shady uncle (presumably an alley cat?) who teaches you the basics of the game.

These basics start with the assembly of robots, which is easily done by dragging and dropping weapons, wheels, and other gadgets onto each other in a way that's remarkably simple and quick. From here, you're taken through combat, which is mostly a passive affair. Your robot and your opponent's both charge at each other automatically, and there's nothing to do but watch how they perform against each other.

Since you can't really control your robot in combat, the focus of CATS is really on building the best robot you can to defeat your opponents. As you win fights, you gain crates, which unlock new bodies, parts, and upgrades that you can add to your vehicles or fuse into your existing parts to make them stronger. The pace of CATS is such that you'll be wanting to switch out and upgrade things almost constantly as the competition gets tougher and tougher.

CATS seems to realize its pace, so it keeps its fights nice and short. Even in its Championship Mode--which pits you against dozens of opponents back-to-back to have you unlock new tiers of parts--takes less than a couple minutes. This is great, as tweaking and testing your machines is definitely the more compelling part of the game. The fights may look nice, but they're only really a reflection of your preparations than anything fun in its own right.

CATS moves satisfyingly swift in the earlier parts of the game, but can slow to a snail's pace due to the game's free-to-play structure. Unlocking new parts almost always takes time, and fusing parts to upgrade existing ones costs gold, an in-game currency that doesn't come in quickly enough.

Because the parts you unlock are also random, it can be hard to consistently make vehicles that can improve on your previous designs. At a certain point, it can feel like you're just waiting to get lucky instead of doing anything meaningful. Other times, you might dump a bunch of gold into upgrading a vehicle part, only to instantly unlock something way better, which can make your efforts feel like a waste.

The core premise of CATS is solid, but the walls that it puts up as part of its free-to-play design can be annoying. This is less true as long as the randomness of unlocks works in your favor, or if you pay, but both of these only offer temporary relief. As a result, it's difficult to get a ton of time or satisfaction out of CATS, despite the fact that it's otherwise a pretty good game.