What to even expect from a game like Leo: The Firefighter Cat? Amazing name aside (don’t worry, my naming bias is just a joke), I half expected for this game to be your typical bottom-of-the-barrel piece of children’s shovelware. The kind of game you’d constantly see on the Wii, being stacked inside Walmart bargain bins. Believe me when I tell you this game isn’t exactly half-bad. I mean, it isn’t good, far from it, and recommending it isn’t something I’ll be able to do, but considering its production values and janky feel, the fact it isn’t a disaster is already a shocking but welcoming surprise.

For a bunch of victims stuck in a catastrophic accident, they all look quite happy.

Let me clarify that I understand that Leo: The Firefighter isn’t aimed at people like me, or anyone above the age of, say, seven. This is aimed at the youngest of crowds, and I don’t see an issue with that. It just needs to be well-crafted for the little ones: easy, but not condescending; accessible, but not banal. Honestly, I do think that the folks at Honikou nailed it in that regard.

This is an action-adventure game with a very simple premise: you’re a feline firefighter, one with a fantastic given name (alright, I’ll stop it now), and you need to complete a series of objectives in each level, which are almost always comprised of driving a vehicle, rescuing other cats, putting out fires, and defeating fireball-shaped enemies.

The “combat” is pretty simple: if you see anything that looks like a ball of fire, hold down RT and hose them away.

It’s all pretty simple. Reach the area on fire, put it out with your hose and near-infinite amount of automatically replenishing water. Both the fires and the fire enemies can be put out in this manner, but you can also, inexplicably, defeat foes with a pretty sick (and metal as hell) axe swing. The axe can be used to destroy obstacles or open car doors as well. You can even earn the right to use a bizarrely mystical water shield after completing some levels, which can be used against enemies. Vehicles can be controlled with ease, and some of them can also shoot water.

Let’s just say that piloting the helicopter wasn’t entirely boring.

Controls aren’t half-bad, even when driving or piloting a helicopter. It just feels a bit confusing at first, since the developers did make a huge mistake by mislabeling some button prompts; I once spent nearly ten minutes looking for a calibration screen on the Xbox just to see if the RB button was working, as it wasn’t making my helicopter land. In actuality, I should have used LT, but the devs had mislabeled the prompt.

Presentation-wise, sadly, I don’t think I can give Leo: The Firefighter Cat a pass. It’s cheap. It’s oh so very cheap. I’m being really generous when I’m stating that a plethora of mid-tier PlayStation 2 games from twenty years ago looked as good as this game, the only thing Leo having over them being an improved resolution, for obvious reasons. With that being said, it, at the very least, runs at a decent framerate. Not that anything in it would ever put the hardware of an Xbox 360 to the test, let alone a Series S, but the point stands.

I know I shouldn’t overthink in a kid’s game but… why am I the only character in the entire game who bothers to wear clothes?

Compared to the bucketload of shovelware we tackle every year, Leo: The Firefighter Cat is actually far from being one of worst releases of 2024. For a kid’s game, it’s not amazing, but I do think younger crowds can have some fun with it, at least for as long as their attention span allows them to. It might be simple, it might be completely devoid of challenge, but it’s a somewhat well-built (albeit massively forgettable) title, never feeling completely boring or even condescending.

Leo: The Firefighter Cat is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Xbox Series S.

A copy of Leo: The Firefighter Cat was provided by the publisher.