Catwoman | DJcube

Feline Domination

NA release: 20th July 2004
EU release: 6th August 2004
JP release: N/A
Developer: Argonaut Games, EA UK
Publisher: EA
NGC Magazine Score: 46%
Mods Used: None

Catwoman was a 2004 film starring Helle Berry. It got many awards for being the worst film of its year. It’s about a version of Catwoman not linked to Batman. She works for a pharmaceutical company, finds out they’re doing shady stuff, gets murdered. Then some stray cats revive her, giving her superpowers. The only bit I’ve watched is a 104 second basketball scene that has 137 cuts in it. The video game adaptation…well, it certainly is a worthy adaptation.

The game has fixed camera angles, many of them abysmal with zero thought as to where you need to go. The controls are extremely unintuitive and awkward, with none of the face buttons being used at all. L is crouch run and R is jump. The c-stick activates Catwoman’s whip but then lets you kick to attack enemies if you hold crouch at the same time. It allows you to attack in any direction, which the game isn’t really designed around as it’s just a standard beat-em-up.

The combat is equally strange. You can’t knock out enemies unless there’s a dumpster or similar hole to kick them into. Sometimes you can scare them so they run away, but it all makes the clunky combat feel even more unrewarding. The platforming sections feel downright broken due to the controls, too. You have to hold up and down to climb up or down poles, but sometimes this also counts as turning around depending on the camera angle (which, again, you can’t change). On some jumps it took a minute to get into the right position because of how bad they are. Using some of the face buttons would certainly have been useful.

The game also does an atrocious job at showing you where you need to go. On top of the camera not helping at all, the level design does not guide you. Sometimes you have to preform odd jumps to get around obstacles (you have slight control mid-jump) and other times you just need to jump on every surface until you find the way to progress. It’s horrible. One extra embarrassing thing is that if you stop playing for more than 30 seconds, the camera will actually move around Catwoman (so, just like Batman Dark Tomorrow, the game does actually work at different angles) as she does a sexy dance to porno music.

Worst

It’s like owning a pedigree Siamese cat -stunning to look at and effortlessly graceful. Now imagine that every time you turned your back on it, it spewed all over your sofa, crapped in your shoes and coughed in your coffee. Every single hour, every single day. It wouldn’t take very long for you to drop it off at the local animal shelter. That, dear reader, is exactly how we feel about Catwoman.
Geraint Evans, NGC Magazine #97

Remake or remaster?

No.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Catwoman.