Cassette Beasts from Bytten Studio and Raw Fury is a colorful new take on the monster-catching genre. Check our Cassette Beasts review!
Cassette Beasts from Bytten Studio and Raw Fury is a colorful new take on the monster-catching genre. You’ll be exploring the remote island of New Wirral, a land inhabited by strange creatures. By making the most of your trusty cassette tapes to record monsters as you explore the island so that you can gain access to their abilities. For those of you too young to remember, once upon a time, we used to record music into these rectangular items placed inside devices of a rectangular nature. It’s a game that has a bit of a darker tone to it thank entries in the long-running Pokémon franchise, with nods to, say, the Shin Megami Tensei or Persona series.
The first step on this journey before exploring starting town Harbourtown will be to create your character. Choose your in-game name, pronouns, favorite color, skin color, hairstyle, hair color, hair accessory color, face, eye color, and face accessory color. You’ll get a real-time preview of how your character will look so that you can make any adjustments as needed. Once you’re set, save your choices and get ready to dive into Cassette Beasts. Oh, and before I forget: you’re stuck in New Wirral! Everyone who finds themselves at New Wirral learns that there’s no way of making it out of the island.
To allow you to learn the basics, you’ll quickly be thrown into a battle with a Trafficrab. You’ll be helped by a stranger who will give you a portable cassette player and your first cassette. I went with a dark aesthetic, so my first transformation was Bansheep. Bansheep is a gloomy, floating, sheep-like creature, and you’ll obtain this transformation thanks to Kayleigh’s help. Once you put on your new headphones, pop in the Bansheep tape, and hit play, you’ll be able to transform into that particular monster!
When in battle, you’ll be able to command your characters by selecting between attacking an opponent with one of your abilities. Some abilities are passive, some have no action points (AP) cost, while others will require you to spend AP to use them. As a general rule, the higher the AP cost, the highest its potential for dealing extra damage or for activating a status effect. Each monster will have a type, and that will dictate which specific abilities they can use. There are also some abilities you can assign to monsters thanks to the power of stickers.
Stickers can be obtained by peeling them off from other cassette tapes so that you can customize your loadout by applying new stickers to other tapes. Some stickers can provide you with a passive ability instead of an attack. Stickers are not compatible with all tapes, but they do give you a chance to expand what you can do in battle. On top of that, you might end up finding uncommon or rare variant stickers which will have improved stats over the regular version of the same sticker.
As was the case for the beloved Pokémon series – which you’ve probably heard about before, right? – there are monsters that can aid you when outside of combat. Scan the right monsters, and you’ll obtain abilities that will allow you to gain access to new areas. If you’ve played a Pokémon game before, then you’ll know what to expect. You’ll be able to swim so that you can get from point A to point B without falling to the bottom. Flight is also a great option that will make it a lot easier to explore New Wirral.
Bytten Studio worked on a Day 1 patch for Cassette Beasts to boost its performance on Nintendo Switch on launch. I have to say that even with this patch, the performance on Nintendo’s console is sub-par. This is even more apparent when playing in Portable or Tabletop Mode, which makes sense since the console’s overall power always takes a step back when not in Docked Mode. There are framerate stutters here and there, outright frame skips when in battle, and the loading is also around the 20-30 seconds mark.
Cassette Beasts is a new take on the very popular monster-catching genre, except that instead of capturing monsters to fight for you, you’ll be recording them with your handy cassette player so that you can transform into them in battle. The game has a charming and colorful presentation and fun gameplay mechanics, but it does suffer from framerate issues that make for a mixed-bag experience. Hopefully the team at Bytten Studio can patch this soon to improve the overall performance. Cassette Beasts is out on Nintendo Switch with a $19.99 price tag. There’s also some DLC to consider, thanks to the Cosplay Pack, which is available for only $1.99. This adds six cosmetic items to customize your look with the Bansheep Hat, Candevil Hat, Traffikrab Hat, Springheel Hat, and Pombomb Poncho.
Disclaimer
This Cassette Beasts review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Raw Fury.
