Jim Lee's Wild C.A.T.S (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
434A playthrough of Playmates' 1995 license-based beat 'em up game for the Super Nintendo, Jim Lee's Wild C.A.T.S: Covert Action Teams.
Played on the default difficulty level.
Note: Carole Baskin is not featured in this game. (I know, I was disappointed too!)
While I have never personally seen the show, Jim Lee's Wild C.A.T.S for the SNES was a tie-in for the cartoon (which itself was based on a comic) that aired over the course of the Fall 1994 television season in America, alongside a line of toys made by Playmates.
WildCATS is standard belt-scrolling brawler that strives to mimic the style and feel of games like Final Fight and Streets of Rage, all with the veneer of a superhero franchise that shared a bit too much in common with the X-Men or Spawn to feel particularly unique or fresh.
You start the game playing as Spartan, the leader of the group, whose design makes me think of Priss (from Blade Runner) wearing a Raggedy Andy wig. Once the opening stage is finished, you are presented with your mission and are given your choice between Spartan, Maul (a slow, powerful Hulk-type), and Warblade (Fulgore, is that you?) as playable characters. They each have separate goals to accomplish, and each success does something to another character to further proceed - for example, for Warblade to gain access to a restricted area, he has to wait until Maul has beaten the password out of an unruly lab technician.
Each of the characters have their own unique abilities, and these make the characters feel quite different from one another. Spartan gets a budget-version of Cyclops' Optic Blast, Maul can charge for short distances, and Warblade can climb walls with his claws. The levels are fairly varied as a result, and they do keep it from getting too stale by the end, despite the fact that the game feels about twice as long as it ought to be.
It also feels very uneven. Warblade's stages can become unbelievably frustrating thanks to the flaky climbing controls, Maul generally doesn't do anymore damage per hit than Spartan does though he's three times bigger and much slower, and Spartan... well, his name leaves him wide-open to a number of apt jokes about the design of his stages. The boss battles don't help the cause much either, thanks to their reliance on cheap hits and massive life bars.
Maybe WildCATS would have fared better if it hadn't been released so close to Capcom's excellent X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse (https://youtu.be/UAFuBJtSy9A ). The design of both games is fairly similar, and there's little question that Capcom crafted the far better game.
WildCATS isn't a particularly bad game, but I ultimately found it thoroughly unappealing. The sprites look nice and are animated well, but nearly every stage features a drab industrial setting, foreground objects regularly block your view of the action, and the top and the bottom of the playfield is bordered with absurdly thick black bars. WildCATS wasn't the only game to do this on the SNES, but when 25-30% of the screen's vertical resolution is sacrificed (for performance, I'm guessing?), it looks ridiculous.
For me, the music was the best part of the game. The tunes are great! But - and this is a big but - the many of the samples sound awful. It reminds me in that way of Imperium, another SNES game that featured fantastic music utterly ruined by the sound quality. I've never been a big Tommy Tallarico fan, and the sound production here didn't change my opinion at all.
Jim Lee's Wild C.A.T.S is a game that I do think was entirely competent in its production, and I could see someone having fun with it, but I didn't find it compelling in the least. From a developer like Beam, I expected something much more.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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