Clawpunk review for PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X

In a way, Clawpunk feels like it’s a spiritual successor to Gori: Cuddly Carnage…except not, because where Gori felt like a throwback to fifteen or twenty years ago, Clawpunk feels like it came from even further back, with an aesthetic that comes straight out of the ‘80s. Obviously, given the linear nature of time, it doesn’t work the other way around – I can’t call Gori, which came out in 2024, a spiritual successor to Clawpunk – but if you were shown the two games without any other context and asked to guess when they were released, you’d probably guess Clawpunk came first.

Those ramblings aside, the games have a surprising amount in common. You wouldn’t think that the phrase, “It’s a game about ultraviolent cats causing mayhem and laying waste to everything around them wherever they go,” would be applicable in too many cases, but now that Clawpunk is out, we can at least say it’s a microgenre of at least two games.

Mind you, Clawpunk approaches things in a very different manner. It’s a 2D roguelite-ish platformer, where you have to guide your army of cats down to the bottom of the screen as quickly as possible, inflicting as much damage on enemies as you can along the way. You’re heavily armed and able to gather more fun weapons and goodies the longer your run goes, but those enemies get harder as well – with some difficulty spikes causing the game to go from very easy in one level to insanely difficult in the next without any warning.

What’s more, the transition from an easy level to a hard level is very abrupt, on account of how quickly this game moves. Levels rarely take more than a couple of minutes. In fact, if you really want to avoid damage you need to move as quickly as possible, which means that some levels can be finished in a matter of seconds. Considering there are only five worlds here, you can see that Clawpunk isn’t a game you’re likely to spend endless amounts of time on – though, of course, with those difficulty spikes, you’ll still need to put a lot of time into just getting good.

But sometimes, all you want is a game that provides a quick blast of action, and Clawpunk delivers that in spades. If you just want to cause mayhem and blast away enemies for a few hours, there are worse ways to pass the time than with this game

Megabit Publishing provided us with a Clawpunk PS5 code for review purposes.