Catch The Fox

Nothing new under the sun to me after decades of gaming, but. It's the kind of game kids will play endlessly trying to improve their catch time. Yeah, sure the game is basic, but as each level unlocks you have to work a bit harder, and take advantage of subtle game mechanics. So it has progression, but perhaps not enough progression to keep anyone but the kids engaged for an hour or maybe two. There is no story to the game, but as far as "doing what it says on the tin", this game has it down.

TLDR: The games systems run counter to it's level design, and this makes feel kind of awful. Long Version The core of Catch the Fox’s gameplay is movement. It’s really the only thing you can do. Getting airborne gives you a speed boost on returning to the ground. This allows the player to skate merrily along. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t for a few issues. The Foxes you need to touch have a hitbox for collisions that’s only slightly smaller then the hitbox for “touching” them. And when the player collides with them, they instantly lose all momentum. This absolutely kills any sense of pacing or chaining together multiple tags. In addition, the players jump is miserable, capable of clearly a small section of environmental obstacles and absolutely nothing else. It’s not high enough to jump over foxes, or up to any interesting areas. The levels themselves are not laid out in such as a way as to actually encourage use of the movement mechanics. One level, Fractal, while quite pretty has literally no capacity to gain speed or momentum, and might as well be flat once you reach the bottom layer. Secondly, the other levels have been populated with a frankly ridiculous amount of wh…

Fun and simple game. Love the concept. The new features added new clever ways to play the game.

There's very little to this game. The levels are all the same: randomly generated outdoor worlds with a minimal amount of extra features added by hand, with randomly moving foxes you must run into to catch. The core idea of the game might be fun - I recall catching the egg-holding wizards in Spyro with fondness, but those were hand-crafted levels with hand-crafted paths where the whole point was finding shortcuts, etc. There's nothing reminiscent of that here; all you do is wander around and when a fox makes the mistake of getting too close change course and touch it. That's all there is to the game; the only progression between the levels is making you catch more foxes and swapping out the ground textures and tree models. I managed to give the game a solid 20 minutes to improve, during which time I finished at least half of it. But any interest and fun was completely exhausted after 5 minutes of play. There's no price at which this game is worth my money. Maybe if you can't stand violence of any type this could be appealing. The only bright spot is the dev is responsive and has tried to address the criticisms of early players such as myself. The game has improved somewha…

The game is poorly optimised and uses bad graphics settings. RTX 3060 drops to 20 FPS, and even with my RX 7900 XT, I only get 80 FPS at 1440p. Why not improve it?

Catch the Fox is an exemplary game as far as catching foxes where they are available. Great for an early developer. We all hope to see how his creations evolve.