Clawpunk review – arcade cyberpunk with a feline theme

GameCentral continues its look back at notable games from 2025, that got missed the first time round, with this bombastic arcade actioner featuring an amazing heavy metal soundtrack.

Video games can be particularly enthralling when they offer you a place to visit – not just a collection of levels and missions, but a cohesive world that feels believable and lived in. Clawpunk may be a work of vibrant pixel art, outlandish characters, cartoon excess, and overexcited energy, but it also provides a marvellous place to visit, that excels in making you return over and over. Put another way, Clawpunk is an exceedingly fun, fascinating place to spend time.

Set in a dystopian sprawl where the aesthetic might best be described as feral cyberpunk, Clawpunk is a place where gangs of street-hardened animals prowl tatty districts in packs, always surrounded by spluttering neon signs and decaying technology, asserting their loyalty through their stylistic choices – just as bikers or metal heads do in our reality. In fact, the character design throughout is heavily inspired by real-world youth subcultures, emphasising the setting as a believable place.

You very much side with the cats, taking control of a group of ragtag felines on a quest to relinquish control of their home from their former ally, turned villain Mr Fuzz. Imagine a blend of West Side Story and Blade Runner, with an anthropomorphised cast that cut out the rhythmic finger clicking and get straight to the brawling, and you’ll be somewhere close to the kind of experience Clawpunk serves up.

The game also has a sense of the rural places on the edge of cities, that get littered with urban detritus, where fly-tipping has ruined a once beautiful countryside. This is, beneath all the excess, a game about the fringes of society, and the places the forgotten or rejected occupy. Clawpunk might be brash, noisy, and snarling on its exterior, but there’s a lot of thought, heart, and love for nature in its bones.

It is also a platforming brawler with gunplay elements that plays out over highly destructible landscapes – and it is clearly and proudly informed by the arcade traditions of intense pacing, impressive depth veiled by apparent simplicity, and challenging difficulty; although on that last aspect developers Kittens in Timespace have done a marvellous job of keeping their creation welcoming to players of a range of ability levels.

Stages typically start with yourself at the top, and the exit point immediately below, albeit many screens down. Between you and that doorway to safety, a lot of obstacles lurk, from heavily armed hounds to explosive barrels and scenery elements placed to impede progress. Initially you assume the role of the upstart punk cat Dash, who moves like lightning and carries a sharp blade. You’ll find yourself leaping from platform to platform, rarely slowing for a beat, occasionally picking up ranged weapons with limited ammo supply.

Most of the environment can be smashed to pieces, although some level elements remain, so the designers can maintain some control over the world they have crafted for you – perhaps leaving a protective roof over a shop where you can top up weapons or health, or forcing you to take a certain route paste a horde of enemies, by preventing you from cutting a bypass tunnel through the stage.

Progress will require you to constantly push forward – or rather down – aggressively pressing and addressing enemies. You can be meticulous, using your ability to destroy the scenery to carve strategic routes to a position from which you can stage an attack, but you won’t be able to play it entirely stealthily.

Clawpunk is a highly dynamic game, where the focus is on speed, movement, momentum, and rarely staying still. As such, it excels at getting the heart racing and delivering high drama action and invigoratingly close calls. You’ll have to get used to failing a lot as you move deeper into its many stages – but the allure to dive straight back in, to have another go, is almost entirely irresistible.

Most levels are a handful of minutes long at most and many can be completed in mere seconds if you simply charge to the end goal with no concern for scoring or absorbing the experience on offer. In fact, one of Clawpunk’s greatest strengths is its capacity for a broad style of playstyles – as long as you keep it dynamic.

The speedrunners can charge through, the score-chasers can unpick and master a system that rewards how much chaos and destruction you cause, and the completionists can carefully, strategically edge forward. You can simply survive stages or look to master them. Light roguelite elements also ensure that no stage will ever quite be the same, but there’s enough balancing behind the scenes to make every run feels comparable in terms of challenge and drama.

When you first set out you won’t get far but in time you open up a range of distinct cats, from the whip-touting ranged specialist Candy, who could easily front a hair metal band, to an unruly cat on a pogo stick that tosses bombs in all directions. As you open up more characters you essentially have more lives to take to a given run. Lose your first cat, and the next will step up to replace them.

Over the course of the game you can unearth and unlock numerous modifying cards, which can be applied to your cats, adding a dose more attacking power, additional speed, or an extra double jump. This lets you customise your cats in all manner of ways, adapting them to your preferred playstyle or tweaking them for a particular collection of stages.

Clawpunk looks and sounds wonderful, even if there’s one aesthetic catch. The writing and performances are solid and distinct, bringing much personality to the experience of play. The soundtrack – a swirl of hard synth, punk riffs, and driving metal – complements and accentuates the game’s action and tone, while the deliciously crunchy, vibrant, sometimes giddily high-contrast pixel art communicates the setting and atmosphere wonderfully.

The animation, too, is superb, even whispering at the quality and personality of movement seen in the Metal Slug series. That catch? Often there is so much visual noise, from explosions and various effects, that it can be too easy to lose your character entirely, and have your health savagely diminished before you regain your bearings. This can be extremely aggravating, although it’s nowhere near enough to ruin the game entirely.

We’d have loved to have seen a multiplayer mode too, as Clawpunk would be riotously fun with friends. Although it’s fairly clear that the screen use and relative chaos aren’t too compatible with couch-based two-player. An online multilayer mode, though, would be a dream. Elsewhere, some players may wish the narrative were pushed more to the fore, but then this is an arcade-inspired game.

Those quirks aside, Clawpunk stands out as a truly brilliant genre contribution, with a remarkably well pitched difficulty curve that makes it feel as if you are constantly improving, overcoming difficulties that a couple of runs ago felt impossible.

If you love brawlers like the recent Streets Of Rage 4, platforming hack ‘n’ slashers such as Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, the aforementioned Metal Slug, or indie run ‘n’ guns like Broforce, you should absolutely give Clawpunk a try – in part because it isn’t exactly comparable to any of those games.

Format: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £7.99
Publisher: Megabit Publishing
Developer: Kittens in Timespace
Release Date: 14th November 2025
Age Rating: 7

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