Considering a portion of your purchase is going to a charity, I'm admittedly going to be a bit easier on this game. I feel bad giving it a bad review since that might deter others from taking the dive and, in turn, helping that charity. But I have to be honest...
And honestly the game is not very good... it's very haphazardly put-together. At the base level, you can call it the VR Catlateral Damage, but I would argue that Catlateral Damage is a better and more fun game than this. This game seems to have almost no effort put into it, whereas I feel like the developers of Catlateral actually cared about making a responsive and fun game for people who love kittiea.
In this one, the kitty animations are so stiff. The kitty model is very poor-looking and barely animates at all. Graphically it isn't fantastic in any way. Though the graphics convey what is important, and the game obviously didn't have a big budget, so I don't think I can fault it much at all. It is not pleasing to look ar, though. To compare to Catlateral Damage, the two games at the base level look pretty much the same, but Catlateral goes for a cartoony art style so it kind of works there. Super Cat Herding doesn't go for any unique style so it is much easier to see its flaws.
Speaking of Catlateral Damage (I promise I'm not affiliated with it, but the comparisons are unavoidable!), the gameplay here is identical, save for the options of powering up your kitty. That is new to this game.
The gameplay boils down to using the feline species' most prolific and unbeatable fiend, a laser pointer, to guide the kitties around the house to destroy everything in sight. It's a fun concept, but the fact that you don't have direct control over the kitty makes it much more difficult to get anything done. One example I have is that I needed her to knock down these books in a bookcase, but no matter how many times I aimed the laser pointer at the bookcase, the cat just wouldn't land inside. I eventually did get it but I honestly think it took 10 minutes of me aiming that thing to get it to happen. And when she finally made it, she knocked over two books and jumped away and I needed to do it all over again!
One could argue that the lack of tangible control is a clever way to acknowledge that cats never do wht they're told, and I can agree to a point. But the physics engine is so bad that more often than not, the cat just doesn't land where you want them to because of some minor invisible barrier. But then sometimes the cat will just fly over said barrier and land on the right counter... it is very erratic and arbitrary. It boils down to you fighting the physics engine more than the cat's artificial intelligence (which by the way literally does not exist).
There really is no strategy, rhyme, or reason to the laser pointer tomfoolery. You could point at the same spot on the wall for 5 minutes, and the cat's jump will be different every time. It gets really frustrating. It's a fun joke, haha, cats don't listen to what you tell them to do. But given the randomness of the physics engine and the lack of feline AI, I really don't think that was intentional.
What is the goal of the game? You have to guide the kitty around to destroy everything (pretty sure that's literal), and then move on to the next area.
Why do I say that I'm pretty sure that's literal? Because from my experience so far, you can not progress until you take down 100% of the items in the environment. And when you do that? You need to find a way to destroy things even further, some of which requires you to disintegrate cereal boxes and other breakable objects.
Example time! There is a kitchen which has cupboards on the ground level. Inside these cupboards are numerous cereal boxes. Opening the cabinets is a chore since you need to guide the feline to the doors and hope you knock them in the right way, such that they will fall down. That's much easier said than done given the terrible physics. But we already conplained about that above, no need to do it any more here. So you break the cabinets down and inside them you see 5 cereal boxes. You ht all of them once to gain "sparkles" (you gain sparkles for every item your kitty touches and/or destroys). This leads you to 100%! Half an hour later, you are now at 100% and can move on, right?
Nope! Once you hit 100%, you are told to make 100% more damage in order to progress. This second phase shouldn't take as long, but it took me quite a while since I was unaware that you don't just need to touch the cereal boxes: you need to find a way to break them.
There are plenty of items that can break. But you aren't really told which ones do and don't. You're kind of left to your own devices to suss that information out. Yeah, okay you can assume a plate is breakable. But a broom? A bottle of whey powder? Cereal boxes? Nonsensical.
I'm sure you don't need to interact with literally 100% of the environmental items, but I also wouldn't be surprised if you have to interact with at least 95% of them. It gets pretty tedious looking for those one or two items that you need to destroy, and it's especially fustrating when you find out those items didn't given you enough sparkles to fill it up to 100%. So the search continues.
What they try to do to spice up the gameplay a bit is add powerups. When you get enough sparkles (which are accumulated via hitting and destroying objects) you can buy the next powerup. These powerups range from coffee to strength rays to various other things. They're pretty fun, actually. And they do add attributes to the kitties. The strength ray makes it easier for them to destroy things rather than simply hitting them, for instance. And they all seem to have a fun graphical or audio effect too. For instance the coffee will make the cat shake, the strength ray make them bigger and their voice deepens. The developers definitely had fun with that element.
I think I've exhausted most of my thoughts. The tl;dr is that it is a poorly-made game with an objective that would be fun if you didn't literally need to destroy/hit 100% of the environment. I think it would be much more palatable if you could progress by getting 60 or 70%. Forcing you to essentially get 100%, and then making you do another 100% on top of -that- is tedium at its most insidious.
I really wish I could give the game a glowing recommendation. Games that are made for charity, or the profits from which will benefit charity, make me very happy, especially when they're good. But I would only buy this if you really care about being charitable and don't care about the product you receive for such charitable actions. It pains me so much to say this, but I just have to be honest. :(.
Not recommended.
