

While this is probably enough for most, hard currency Gems are available in bundles ranging from 90 for $1.99 to 12,000 for $99.99. You can watch video ads to chip away at wait timers 30 minutes at a time.īut here, there's another path for those who don't wish to spend with the offer of video ads that chip away at the wait timer 30 minutes at a time. To succeed in C.A.T.S. you'll need a good vehicle, and to build a good vehicle you'll need good parts. While King of Thieves was inelegant, with luck-based systems that occasionally felt unfair, C.A.T.S. Fights are quick and easy to watch, and you can bet items on the outcome of bouts between other players. Expect to see ZeptoLab make more of this in the future.īut it's in the game's monetisation design that the benefit of ZeptoLab's experience with King of Thieves really shows. Interestingly, despite this, there's a definite eSports feel to the whole affair. In C.A.T.S., following a trend popularised in Asia, actual bouts play out by themselves and leave the player to focus on tweaking and upgrading their weaponised vehicle. The key difference, though, is that in King of Thieves much of the minute-to-minute gameplay was about one-touch platforming.

It's a simple drag-and-drop affair for the most part, with more complex strategy involved in levelling up parts and designing a unit that can withstand various forms of attack, but like King of Thieves it errs on the right side of midcore with its bright and appealing aesthetic. also allows the player to show their creative flair by decking out modular fighting machines for felines to do battle in. Just as the appeal of King of Thieves was in setting up traps to form a fiendish defence, C.A.T.S. is clearly an evolution of many ideas present in King of Thieves. However, it was eventually able to make the game a success and it looks like it's been a valuable learning experience for the developer. Launched in early 2015, the studio has been open about the struggles it faced with King of Thieves and the changes it was forced to introduce as a result.
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This time, we're taking a look at C.A.T.S.: Crash Arena Turbo Stars, a competitive midcore effort from Cut the Rope developer ZeptoLab that hit an impressive eight million downloads in its first weekend.īest known for its casual series Cut the Rope - and its cute protagonist Om Nom, which quickly became famous in its own right - Russian studio ZeptoLab's first game of a more midcore bent was King of Thieves. The end goal is to see whether the game makes a good enough case for us to part with our cash, or whether players are content - or engaged enough - to 'freeload'. In each instalment, we consider the incentives or pressure applied to make in-app purchases, their perceived value, the expansion offered by IAPs and the overall value of the experience. Welcome back to the In-App Purchase Inspector - our regular look at free-to-play games from the consumer's perspective.
