MouseBot (iOS) Review

A classical story of a cat and mouse hunt unfolds in MouseBot: Escape from CatLab on iOS. It is a classical concept about a mouse hunt taken to the stage of a runner-like maze game filled with traps, which bears a pretty pleasant mix of malice and comedy. A big mean cat needs to catch mice, and has hired inventors to build them the perfect mice capture devices. To test their efficiency, the boss puts the traps through several tests to catch the MouseBot, which is on a hunt for the exit of the malicious trap filled mazes and yummy yellow cheese. When the traps inevitably fails and MouseBot proceeds further and further on its escape from the CatLab, the player is rewarded with a satisfying punchline.

The comedy is satisfying, yet sadly too distanced from the gameplay at large to give the desired effect. Beside the occasional traditional mousetraps as a reminder that this is a cat and mouse-like hunt, it is very easy to forget the wonderful setting as the comedic punchlines are too far in between, and the stages do get repetitive very quickly even with new traps introduced at a rapid and healthy pace.

The reason behind this is that the title plays a lot on one of the biggest issues in the freemium market, namely to fill it with purposely inserted gamedesign flaws. The first hour of MouseBot is a very pleasant experience, but after that point, and especially upon starting the water level, the difficulty curve starts to become extremely steep, and it only gets more so from that point on just to make the player die a lot and watch advertisements, paying up premium currency to get more lives, or to simply buy the premium service.

Even then the difficulty is extremely annoying. Most games using this kind of tricks to make the player pay more are highscore hunting games or ridiculously long semi-randomized titles such as Candy Crush Saga where the semi-randomized nature of the levels are enough to make each attempt feels fresh and enjoyable, but in here it simply becomes an annoyance in an otherwise entertaining cat and mouse escape title.

It is really sad as, without this flaw, MouseBot would be an extremely good and price worthy title, even if paying the full premium price for it. It offers a lot of great content, and there is a lot of potential that future updates can bring to the table. It is a really great and entertaining freeware product to throw away some time with during the daily activities, but it's just sad to see it throwing weird curve balls with the difficulty level that really decreases the overall quality, as it is obvious that the developer team can do so much better seeing how wonderful this game is.