Image: Bamtang Games & Trailmark Games

I'll be the first to admit that, as a 40-something with no kids, the long-running Warrior Cats book series has largely passed me by. Over the past 23 years, the series has spawned over sixty main books, comic and manga adaptations, a barrage of novellas, and now Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest, an ambitious sandbox RPG, out today.

While I've not had a chance to dig as deep as I would have liked, even one evening of play had me feeling like I'd hit as far as this adaptation's depths went. Not a terrible experience by any means, just a simple one, and more reliant on procedural generation than I would have liked, and initial reviews seem to confirm my fears.

So, for those unfamiliar with the setting, the books can be very loosely summarized as being a bit like Watership Down, but instead of traumatized rabbits, it follows several groups of forest-dwelling cats that have organized themselves into almost Naruto-esque mystical ninja clans, living by a strict warrior code and ancestral religion. Let's be real, if cats could talk, they absolutely would be ninja nerds.

And so, beyond designing your own cat (via a remarkably robust character creator), the first thing the game asks you is to pick which of the four main clans–Thunder, River, Wind, or Shadow–you want to play as a member of. That ambitiously promises whole campaigns, each one based around a prophecy foreseen by the elders of that kitten kaboodle.

Octopath Traveler on four legs? Well, not quite. While it promises 'no two playthroughs being the same', that's because aside from the occasional plot beat, the game is mostly doling out randomly generated quests: Go here, mark these places with your scent, beat up this roaming animal, explore this zone and so on, set across a decently large open world.

The problem is that aside from environment art, the four main cat-kingdom regions are fundamentally the same, mechanically. There are trees to climb (from designated climbing points) to get you across to high ledges. There are sunning spots that permanently upgrade your cat's stamina to rest at. There are randomly spawning critters that you need to hunt because your clan's food stocks count down by 1% every 90 seconds, threatening debuffs (WHY!?), and there's a lot of fighting.

The fighting is pretty solid, though. It's basically Pokémon meets traditional JRPG, each of your three-cat party having four skills you can swap in or out as needed, plus a bag (primordial pouch?) of herbs and plants to provide healing, stamina boosts, or debuffs. There's decent depth here, with a bunch of status effects to inflict or receive, but the winning strategy in almost all cases seems to be 'gank the DPS' and burn down enemies from most to least dangerous.

While the core adventures seem anemic, the game also seems packed with extraneous systems. Do I really need real-time crafting asking me to wait 48 hours for a decoration to appear in my cat's customizable den? Does there need to be a system for my Steam friends to visit and speed up the process? Was there really a need for a run-based boss rush mode? Who is the asynchronous PvP mode for, specifically?

My feeling is that they've had enough ideas here for three separate games and crammed them all into the same mid-to-low budget production, allowing none of them to shine. There's solid bones here. The world is nice to explore, the procedural cats are recognizable in their variety, and the Pokemon-ish combat isn't bad, even if there's a clear dominant strategy.

I doubt I'll be playing much more of this one, but for huge fans of the books, it does feel like they've captured a lot of the vibe and style of it all. But for those wanting a juicy JRPG or even just a good creature collector, there's a mountain of them to pick from. Final Fantasy Resonance landed just this week, and I cannot miss an opportunity to shout out Cassette Beasts and its fantastic soundtrack.

But if you're a Warrior Cats fan with an entire bookcase full of its overly dramatic, ninja-adjacent felines, you still might be on board. In that case, Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest is out now for £25/$30, with a £12/$15 pack of cosmetic goodies (including some wearable accessories and a cel-shading mode) as an optional extra.