The essence of a score attack game in which you constantly compete to up your previous best score is the addition of a basic rule set with a slightly random nature to the gameplay that makes no two games unique. You know how to play Tetris but every game is its own and thats what makes it so addictive and special. The same applies to all the great score attack games such as Geometry Wars or Pac-man. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Pix the Cat that does a good portion of things right but fails to meet the pick up and play nature required for true success in the genre.
Imagine a cross of Snake and Pac-man and you get something that resembles Pix the Cat. The core essence of the game is to pick up duckling eggs (they turn into ducklings to follow you though) in a trail and deposit them at various spots throughout the maze. You extend and increase your combo the longer you can complete the maze in one run as the chain is broken once you run out of able moves. Your given a set time period each game and play the maps in the same order every time. Herein lies the major flaw of the game, predictability. Perhaps its just me but I like my score attack games to have a random essence through in the mix to ensure no two games feel alike. Instead Pix traverses the same path each time and soon the whole thing becomes a bit too repetitive for my liking. Granted the point probably is to master your path through each maze but I never really felt the desire to do so and the controls which don’t seem as twitchy 10% of the time make all the difference too. Again perhaps its a lack of mastery of the mechanics and mazes but it just never all came together to feel right.
Its a shame too as the games visuals and music are awesome. The soundtrack is well worth a listen if nothing else and the graphical styling is reminiscent of Pac-man Championship Edition and the futuristic graphical style I’d like to imagine would be present in arcades if they still were as common place today. The game also features plenty of additional modes outside of the main game, including an unfathomable amount of challenge levels which task you with collecting and dropping off blobs. There a fun aside from the main game and quite rewarding to accomplish but the sheer amount of them is too great. I almost feel that the developers time would have been better spent crafting a fewer amount of higher quality stages rather than opting for the quantity option that appears to be the case.
Pix the Cat had potential but its failures in some key areas as a whole make it feel as a wasted potential rather than a well executed one. It has charm, it has a rocking soundtrack and it even looks the part which makes my disappointments with the gameplay systems all the more disheartening.