Meow Express

released on Jan 07, 2022

You are a cat on a robot vacuum cleaner. Which means you are bus driver in the cat world! Dodge obstacles, pop innocent kids' baloons, dash through buildings to collect your fellow cat pussengers. Meow Express is a cute, fun and annoying casual arcade game, just like our furry friends.


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Meow Express is one of those games where the controls are so simple yet hard to master. And what appears to be a basic game, it shows its true depth and strategy the more you play it. It’s crazy that I often tend to play these indie games over big budget ones that are part of my backlog.

You’re a cat taxi driver tasked with taking cats to their destination with your mini space ship. Expect many playful location names turned into cat form cleverly XD You advance to the next stage once you have 6 cats. Getting to them is not as easy as it sounds because controlling the ship is by pressing or holding a button to make you float while it’s an auto runner and you also have dash to quickly get out of nasty situations. You collect balloon hearts (4) to get one shield and you can have 2 shields at a time. The rest turns into money. You also get money paid every time you pick up a cat and deliver all 6 of them at the end of the stage. Money is spent on upgrades (such as less hearts needed etc) or outfits. The strategy is assessing if the risk is worth the effort. Do you pick a heart balloon with the chance that you might get hit? Is it better to pick a balloon now for money or wait until one of your shields are used to protect yourself? You can also pick cats sooner (scattered randomly) than waiting until you reach the bus station. This allows you to finish a stage quicker, potentially avoiding traps or you might get hit when picking up a cat. There are more such examples that I haven’t even brought up. This is what makes the game fun. I also like the fact the achievements are fair and designed in a way to let you enjoy the game for a couple of hours (in my case more than 4 hours) without boring you and making you grind for no reason.

The graphics are functional yet charming and the music actually sounds pretty good. The only real problem are the control options. Controllers are not supported, so you either use your keyboard or customise one through Steam. I made use of the latter as I can’t imagine playing a game like this on a keyboard. It’s a good thing you have the option to solve this problem but it really should have been supported natively.

It appears the game is offered for free on Steam at the moment. I got it through a Humble bundle and am glad it got included. I definitely think it’s worth playing if you enjoy these type of games.

The game is basically the cat version of flappy bird, though it seems the controls are even more annoying, than I remember flappy bird being on the phone.

In Meow Express, rather than being a derpy bird, you are a derpy looking cat atop a robotic vacuum cleaner that flies! The premise is that you are a cat bus driver and your job is to collect as many cat passengers as you can and get through the stages and deliver the passengers to pillow land, which is the main menu of the game.

The artstyle is cute and fun, the soundtrack is pretty great and the puns are purrfect! Sadly the game itself is very annoying and not really all that fun. There is some maneuvering you can do to get farther in the game and reach 100% achievements, but other than that, it's just bad in my opinion.

It might be for you though, and I will definitely recommend this game, because the game is cheap and well made. There were lots of people who enjoyed flappy bird, so there must be people that enjoy this game as well!