CatDash Combines Felines And Endless Runners
Cat Dash ($0.99) by Mindblast is an endless feline runner.
Flash, Dash, and Smash are just three cats trying to make it down crazy halls and alleys filled with scissors, trashcans, meat cleavers, and high heeled shoes. Dash is your middle-of-the-road kind of cat. Flash can do insane Matrix-style jumps through the air. Smash can just eat his way through trouble.
Fish and catnip bonuses are available, which will vary in their usefulness, depending on which cat you are playing. In typical Lolcats style, a cheeseburger serves as your health meter.
This game seems to follow the rule of threes: you have three cats to play as, three different gameplay modes, and three different control styles. The only option that breaks this rule is your view mode (portrait or landscape). A help menu gives you the lowdown on how to play, the different items, and the three cats.
The three gameplay modes are: quick, normal, and endless. Quick mode gives you a two minute time limit to score as many points as you can. Normal and endless are essentially the same, the only difference being endless mode takes longer for the difficulty and speed to increase.
What’s really neat is the ability to customize how you’d like to play. I must admit that the default setup, including sliding your finger across the screen to move the cat, and viewing in landscape mode, don’t do the game much justice. I was almost ready to give up on the game then and there.
However, I discovered that gameplay became much better for me once I selected the tilt control and portrait mode. Tilting felt more responsive when it came to using the special ability, and portrait gave a better view of what nasty surprises were coming my way.
While customizing the controls was a big help, I still found a couple of things lacking that left me on the fence about this game. Namely, lack of Game Center support (the scores are all local, and use the cat’s name instead of your own), and the cheeseburger health meter isn’t as clear as it could be.
But that’s not to say that you won’t have a better time of it than I did. Certainly, if you’re into cats and endless runners, this one’s for you.