The cat’s out of the bag! My Cat Club, created by leading game developer and publisher PikPok®, is a relaxing cat collection game with a comprehensive cat adoption and room designing simulator that virtual pet lovers would enjoy. Unlike the usual gameplay that virtual pet enthusiasts are all too familiar with, we guarantee it’s a pleasant surprise. Read on for our gameplay review.
Gameplay Overview
You start out as a budding newbie in the Cat Club community, where every community member shares pictures and adorable moments of their feline friends. At the adoption centre, you’ll be given a choice to select your desired cat. Once done, you’ll be introduced to Boots, a kitty influencer who helped you grow your social media following.
The element of this cat adoption simulator is to snap cute photos of your adopted virtual cats and design photo sets to showcase your unique flair. Throughout the game, you’ll slowly meet and get to know other community members and contribute to raising awareness for pet adoption. How adorable is that?
Breeding Unique Cats in My Cat Club
Remember how Neopets introduced genetics and breeding into their gameplay, and so many players were vying to get unique mixes? Well, PikPok brought this feature into My Cat Club, and it’s our favourite part of the game. We love mixing and matching our adopted and visiting cats to create a lineage of furry friends!
The genetics in My Cat Club are divided into two sections: dominant and recessive. Dominant traits are visible to players, while recessive traits must be unlocked using Gems. The kittens are born with traits from their parents, with their body type, fur pattern and colour, behaviour and eye colour randomly determined.
Also, the cats’ love nest is the only place to tap on the visiting cats to give them pets – you can’t even pet your adopted cat on the game’s main screen. It’s a bummer, but at least you can still shower the cats with love!
Design Dreamy Cat Cribs
As your career progresses and your social media presence grows, you’ll unlock the storyline with Photo Series that will reward you with different backgrounds in your room. For each series, you’ll get to choose furniture and featured cats according to the tags & skills required to score ‘likes’ by your followers. There’s a learning curve to planning and strategising your decor placement, but don’t worry, as the game has prompts to guide you. Once you’ve figured it out, it’s fun!
There are various types of furniture that you can collect as freebies from completing certain levels and can be purchased from the shop. Each piece of furniture has a corresponding ‘mood’ tag to it that will enable you to satisfy the photoshoot requirements and to get a better result, consider upgrading your furniture (not required, but you can pay to get more in-game currency).
Snap Aww-inducing Photos
After setting the room’s layout with the decor items you’ve collected and the cats you’ve adopted, you can snap away to your heart’s content! Players are given the thrill of directing a shoot – you can choose where to place the cats, adjust their poses, and move around the virtual viewfinder to get the best angle. It’s fun and intuitive, but photo direction actually requires strategy.
Photo reviews are part of the challenges – our tip is to tap on the ‘Boost Post’ button and watch a quick ad before submitting to get a sweet multiplier buff to greatly increase your final number of likes. In a nutshell, the photo review considers the tags and skills associated with the photo, and we recommend playing it smart by timing your multipliers well and avoiding boosting the wrong tags to score a gold rating. For example, kittens can increase your post likes exponentially, but they grow up within 24 hours. Try to cram in as many missions as you can within that timeframe.
Moreover, My Cat Club also has a multiplayer feature where anyone can participate in limited-time events by contributing to reviewing photos taken by real players all over the globe and earning special surprises and gifts. However, at the time of the review, there seems to be a connection issue bug that’s hit on the multiplayer feature – maybe wait until the developers fix it to utilise it.
Our Verdict on My Cat Club
Did we wish that we could play with our own fluffy kitties? Yes. Did we wish we could at least feed our virtual cats? Yep. If you’re expecting to be able to interact with your adopted feline friends, the most you can do is to adopt, breed, and pose them. To us, it felt like the ‘care’ aspect for your cats is reduced to ‘levelling up’ your cat’s skills, done with a simple button push. Hopefully, in the near future, we could see an expansion in this game where we can take care of the kitties!
Despite its (fixable) shortcomings, the game has a well-polished feel and is a hit amongst gamers who love cats and decorating-centric games. The user interface is clean, it’s straightforward to play, and there’s a continuity to the gameplay where players can get easily hooked into decorating and snapping photos all day. Would we say it’s one of the best virtual pet games released? Possibly – if they add a feature where you can care for your cats.
Therefore, virtual pet gamers who are all for interacting with their pet could give this game a pass or try a new genre of virtual pet gameplay (since it is free to play!), which may get you addicted to it in a good way.
Where To Download My Cat Club?
My Cat Club is free to play and downloadable on the App Store and Play Store.
