It is pretty obvious what Cat Quest II is going for – and, no, not just “Cat Quest but with multiplayer this time” (although that is true as well). Cat Quest II wants to be a warm, cosy, low-investment time-sink. The sort of game you can play and just turn your brain off for a while. It is extremely cartoonish, severely pun heavy, and remarkably simple. It is certainly one of the most accessible games on the Nintendo Switch, and it is something someone can jump into right away even without having played the original adventure.
It is a very light, breezy sort of game, and that winds up being its greatest strength and greatest weakness. For as easy to pick up and accessible as it is, sometimes it feels so breezy that it might just get blown away with a strong enough draft. Beneath its surface-level appeal, Cat Quest II is very thin on actual substance. Repetition, a short runtime, and overly simplistic design choices wind up dooming this one to the litter box. 
Cat Quest II is, unsurprisingly, the sequel to Cat Quest. What’s new this time around, then? Honestly, not much. Players are going to have to squint pretty hard to see any substantial differences. This sequel does expand the simple top-down combat somewhat and adds in new spells, weapon types, and bigger maps to help round out the adventure a bit more. The biggest and most notable addition, however, is the local two-player cooperative play where players can grab a friend and team up as a cat and dog at the same time. The single-player mode allows players to swap between the two on the fly, but honestly there is so little difference between the two characters that most people probably won’t bother to swap more than once or twice.
This is a game that feels like it is trying to get by mostly on charm, and there simply isn’t enough here to coat over some of the more notable issues. Not everything is bad. The game’s 2D, hand-drawn aesthetic and animation look sharp and definitely catch the eye. It does seem to run a bit poorly on the Switch and there is frequent stuttering and staggering, which is disappointing considering how simple things look. Enemies and NPCs are at least adorable and the UI is crisp and approachable. The presentation here is pretty good and there is a subset of gamers that just love all things cats and doggos that might fall in love with this for the cuteness alone. Backgrounds are a bit generic, and the same environments and dungeons are basically used the entire game, but overall the design is at least a strength.
Where the charm starts to wane is when the game actually gets around to talking. Cat Quest II is broken up into a series of story quests and side quests, and every single one of them plays out exactly the same way. There is a story here but that term is used very loosely. What this game actually has is an absolute non-stop barrage of cat puns and dog wordplay. Things aren’t perfect – they’re purrfect. Things aren’t rough – they’re ruff. Things aren’t struggling to tell a cohesive narrative – they are meowgling to bark a puphesive kittentive. It is exhausting reading through this game because it has one joke and it uses it a million times.
There is some overarching narrative about cat kings and dog kings in waiting, but it gets the minimum attention possible. No one is going to care about anything here because the entire game is drowning in lazy wordplay disguised as comedy. It is one of the most exhaustively unfunny games ever released. Unless someone just loves drinking from the firehouse of the same handful of puns over and over, most people are just going to wind up skipping the dialogue at some point.
Unfortunately, this sort of repetition is kind of a reoccurring theme in Cat Quest II and if this game does something once, it is going to do that same thing twenty more times. Take the combat, for instance. Combat at first feels pretty snappy and it feels like a good “jump in and play” type game. Attack, dodge, cast spells, pick up better gear; it is all the stuff you would expect from a simple hack-and-slash RPG. The game doles out a variety of simple toys to play with: ranged weapons, spells that change how you approach fights, and modifiers that try their hardest to make later battles feel a bit different than early ones.
The biggest point in Cat Quest II‘s favour is the local couch co-op. It is definitely the sequel’s headline feature and it works pretty well. Playing as two characters with a friend does add a fun element of coordination. It would probably work pretty well as a parent-and-kid type game, and the cutesy interface and relatively simple gameplay might fit that niche audience really well.
That lovely simplicity is unfortunately also the game’s undoing. The core gameplay elements here are paper thin, and it makes the gameplay feel repetitive really quickly. Combat hinges on a few attack animations and then rapid rollaway dodging. There’s loot, but gear upgrades don’t force any meaningful changes to playstyle. Here is what is going to happen for almost all players: they’ll find a weapon and a couple of spells they like early on, and those are the only ones they use the entire game. The upgrade system actually sort of forces things to be this way.
You spend coins to upgrade weapons and armour and spells, but once you’ve upgraded one a bunch there is never a reason to swap to a “better” one because it’ll take too much money to actually make it better than the one that is being used. Therefore the first fight and the fiftieth fight and the five-hundredth fight all play out almost exactly the same way. There isn’t enough variety in enemy type, so players are going to be stuck hacking and slashing their way through the same handful of enemies from start to finish. Combat grows stale quickly and Cat Quest II becomes a slog to get through very early on.
Dungeons are generally compact and well designed, but they repeat the same tricks often enough that any novelty there also fades very early on. There are really only a couple of different dungeon types, and a lot of these dungeons use the very same traps and tricks so it never feels like the game is growing in anyway. A lot of the dungeons are optional anyway, and the rewards for completing them are frequently new weapons and gear that are never going to be used over the maxed out starting sword the feline hero has been wielding since twenty minutes in.
Players looking for deep progression, interesting build variety, or complex encounters are going to feel very disappointed as Cat Quest II progresses and fails to grow in any meaningful way. There is some initial charm because the game is cute, but that charm only gets the game so far, which is right around the twenty-seven-minute mark before boredom overpowers everything else.
It very much feels like one of those quick flash-in-a-pan kind of games. The sort of game someone can play for a couple of minutes here or there and then forget about entirely once it’s finished. The main campaign is not only repetitive – it is pretty brief. Short and repetitive is almost impressive in a way because that is a very hard combination of bad things to pull off. This is definitely a sub-10-hour game for most people, and many can probably clear the main quest in 6-7 hours. There is plenty of optional content that likely doubles the length, but again the game doesn’t provide the sort of complexity that is needed to make most of this stuff worth it.
