Welcome to our review of Calico, a game where you need to run a cat cafe?
Calico is a day-in-the-life community sim game where you are given an important and adorable task: rebuild the town’s cat café and fill it with cute and cuddly creatures! Build up your café by filling it with cute furniture, fun decorations, yummy pastries, and get it bustling with animals again!
Calico is meant to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The gameplay reflects that with a laid back, low-stress creative environment to explore and play in.
The Calico character creator will allow players to create their own magical person to experience the world through. There will also be plenty of clothing to choose from and collect throughout the game!
All Animals are Interactive! The player will encounter many animals in the world of Calico. Once befriended, you can name them, add them to your party, or send them to their new home at the café. Animals in your party will follow you everywhere you go and listen to your commands. The animals in your café will relax and play with any customers that pop in for a visit.
Your task in Calico is to bring the town’s café back to life again. This isn’t just achieved by bringing in cats and animals alone, however – you can also decorate your café with furniture of different styles to create the perfect cozy home for you and your animals!
Create a wonderful café by making yummy baked goods and drinks for the townspeople! Learn about your fellow villagers to pick and choose their favorite foods to sell!
We wanted there to be no limits to how you could find happiness in Calico. Magic potions are a system that allow us to break the rules of what is possible and to find what would be most fun. Example: the More-to-pet Potion allows the player to magically turn a single animal giant-sized! You can hang out with a giant animal, or even ride a giant cat!
Calico was a very disappointing experience. Plain and simple, I almost felt like I was playing Cyberpunk again, it was that buggy in my experience. So I played this game on Steam and my PC has a benchmark over 20k, so definitely more than capable to handle anything a game of Calicos’ level can throw at it. Surprisingly enough, half of the time, the fans were in overdrive and that is not even the worst part of this experience…
I had so many bugs… Disappearing walls, first-person views that did not pan out, unable to perform many tasks, … Like that time I had to try cooking a recipe, the weird design choice on how to manually make things, not allowing me to pick up the eggs until after a restart, …
Or when I was trying to decorate my cafe, I had entered a first-person view where I was literally on top of the chair I wanted to place. I had to redo it 3 times just to place it underneath a table and well, I had to place 2 couches, 2 tables, and 4 chairs… It felt more like a horrible set of real-life chores than anything else.
No, I did not enjoy Calico at all… I love cats, heck I got 4 pedigree babies at home and they even got their own Instagram (@nevazhenya). Calico actually did everything to make my gameplay less than enjoyable and it has to be said…. Calico might be the second-worst experience in the bug department I had this month…
In conclusion, Calico is a good attempt at an Animal Crossing clone trying to cash in on the universal love for cats. It sadly fails miserably and delivers nothing more than a janky experience…
3/10
Tested on PC
