Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest review

Did you ever grow up hungering for a game adaption of your favorite fantasy book? Back in middle school, I knew the Warriors series topped my list. You tell me if the concept doesn’t sound tailor-fit for an RPG: there’s four warring tribes of wildcats, all caught between constant territorial disputes, political strife, treacherous conspiracies, and, yes, religious theocracies dictating their day-to-day lives. All this sets the stage for a Hero’s Journey tale starring a pet cat–or “kittypet”, as per Warriors lexicon–who learns the way of the Warrior Code and follows his destiny to band the forest together against an impending threat. Riveting prose, rounded characters, and gripping twists and turns ensue.

Well, twenty years later, I’ve got good news for my brooding 14-year-old self: that RPG’s finally arrived in the form of Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest. Unfortunately, there’s a catch: it’s, uh, not good.

Warrior Cats is, in a word, sloppy. I refer not to the dismissive vernacular referring to GenAI—rest assured the game’s narration is done via professional voiceover—yet I’m left with no other descriptor for a game that, quite frankly, was not ready for release. Embarrassing glitches and typos plague all four campaigns like a spell of greencough (check out the inexplicable floating moss above), the limp storytelling is no match for Firestar’s vindicating rise to leadership, and the ugly graphics echo not Wayne McLoughlin’s gorgeous covers but an early PlayStation 2 title. All this and more coalesce into a shallow husk of a game—one stuck together with glue and duct tape, bearing none of the quality or confidence one would expect for a licensed property that’s sold 90 million books and counting.

At first glance, Warrior Cats gets the basics right: the game features all four clans—ThunderClan, RiverClan, WindClan, and ShadowClan—for the player to choose from, each with their respective campaigns to enjoy. Aspiring warriors decorate their customizable kitty avatars with lavish patterns and ethereal naming schemes (Shadowfire, Sunfur, Brookpool—ooh, just feel the linguistic texture). With the ancestors of StarClan at our back, we’re set to reenact the headcanon of our childhoods—right down to replicating old Warriors OCs from our old high school notebooks and DeviantArt pages. (We ain’t judging; really!)

Sadly, the budgeted constraints of Warrior Cats means it can hardly live up to the books, let alone our imaginations. For whatever conspiracies beset their respective clans, all four routes follow the same script of basic gameplay loops: marking clan territory, chasing down rogue cats, finding lost kits and ingredients, getting into border scuffles, and copious amounts of mandated grinding. All procedurally generated, mind, recycling busywork and plot points to the extent that the routes blend together into downright vapidity, right down to sending players to go stare at the Gathering tree for no reason.  

Putting it this way: when you’ve played one campaign, you’ve played them all. It’s one thing for suspension of disbelief to impede us at earning clan leadership in under three hours—it’d be unfair to expect developer Bamtang Games to deliver something on the mammoth scale of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave. Yet whether it’s the evident shoestring budget or the absence of RPG development know-how, the copy-paste set-up renders the game ill-equipped to handle the ambition necessary for a multi-campaign venture. (And, arguably, Warriors itself.)

Not that the individual plotlines are anything special, mind. All are built upon the same skeleton of “StarClan delivers a prophecy you must fulfill”, complete with consequential dialogue trees that forge bonds with your fellow clanmates and influence the outcome of your journey. Granting players agency to pencil in their cat’s personality, thoughtful responses evoke a noble hero concerned only for what’s best for the clan, whereas rash ones entail a stubborn warrior valuing only the thrill of combat.

It’s a decent attempt to evoke the series’ pathos, but not a very fulfilling one: the relationship meters amount to little significance, and consequences typically don’t tread beyond “this cat may or may not betray you” or “your cat gets a battle scar, even if you pick the dodge option”.  Furthermore, each story falls into the same pratfalls of abrupt plot twists or underbaked revenge plots, with the ShadowClan plotline particularly struggling with context: the avatar’s half-breed background is randomly introduced as a relevant plot point, while a certain legacy character’s return will confound anyone unfamiliar with or behind on Warriors.

Hence the “sloppy” critique: while Warrior Cats tries to emulate Erin Hunter’s poetic prose, it is constantly undermined by typos and errors galore. Merely heed the litany of offenses filling my notes: highlights include narration VO failing to match the subtitles, instances of holdover dialogue (“I’m taking 1’s herbs but they don’t seem to be working”), or cats greeting you with “There’s nothing new for you right now. May StarClan guide your path. You can go explore” even when under attack or having just threatened your life. Playing Warrior Cats is less like mingling with familiar characters and instead being surrounded by broken animatronics populating an off-brand Warriors theme park.

This absence of quality control continually takes you out of the experience, and that’s not getting into the numerous glitches that impeded my experience: the game crashed multiple times, and chase sequences forced resets with how fleeing cats got stuck in the game’s geography. One can only hope there’s a Day One patch in the works.

Again, it’s not like Warrior Cats doesn’t make earnest strides to feel like the original series; naturally, it wouldn’t be Warriors without combat, and its turn-based encounters employ a stance-based rock-paper-scissors model that’s the game’s one triumph. For instance, defensive positions will buffer any direct assaults, but trick stance will circumnavigate past your guard and often inflict status effects. From heeding attack order to inflicting steady doses of poison, players can’t simply brute-force their way through enemy encounters, instead relying on their wits and crafting appropriate moveset builds to ensure their clan survives another day. (I only wish the party set-ups were more personalized—your accompanying warriors join only at the whims of the story, not from personal choice.)

Alas, other familiar Warriors staples outright fail to impress. Fresh-kill is accumulated to keep your clan in peak performance, yet their slow depletion never provides any pressing sense of friction. Meanwhile, you can customize numerous dens to show off to friends visiting your camps via online, but good luck getting them done before completing the game: for whatever reason, all decorations are built under timers lasting up to forty hours—a number far outstripping the four hours necessary for completion.

One may say that’s what the post-game’s for, but the game’s confusing maze of an overworld offers little incentive to keep playing. It offers sunning spots to discover and superbosses to challenge, yes, but players will have long since grown exhausted of its confusing layouts and roundabout backtracking—I can’t begin to tell you how many times I consulted the in-game map thinking I was a stone’s throw away from my destination only to be told that, no, I had to traipse around the map to reach the stupid Moonpool. Even basic actions like running feel off, conveying not the pulse of the earth beneath our paws but the weightlessness of skidding across the moon.

I mean not to dismiss Warrior Cats entirely: preteen fans still learning the ways of the forest might—emphasis “might”—delight in customizing their cats with radioactive colors and mustachioed birthmarks, and may even enjoy showing off their digs online. Yet it’s too fundamentally flawed for older fans to appreciate, too contextually impenetrable for the curious to jump into, and just too dysfunctional to satisfy most anybody. It doesn’t help that Warrior Cats is no looker, especially on Switch 2: it employs a stylized aesthetic more evocative of the graphic novels, yet the rudimentary graphics and texture-work scarcely compare to the beautifully-realized forests hosted in our developing brains back in the mid-aughts. (Or whenever you first read the books, anyway.)

Warriors as a property has endured via its innate appeal to self-expression, whether you grew up replicating clan life in the schoolyard, participated in online RPs, or simply adorned yourself with a cool Warrior name. Warrior Cats understands this assignment, but its flunking most everything else means your digital avatar will never deliver the same satisfaction as the ThunderClan warrior you drew, play-acted, or wrote fanfiction about all those years ago. Take a page from my book and take the opportunity to instead go back and read, well, the books. They still hold up, trust me.