Cash Cow DX (Indie Review)

Cash Cow DX
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Steam
Released February 16, 2024 on Steam
Released September 26, 2024 on Switch
Developed by Pixel Games
Published by Flynn’s Arcade
$4.79 (Normally $5.99) had a cow in the making of this review.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I sure loved Donut Dodo. Boy, what a fun game that was. Not just one of the best indies I’ve ever played.. not just one of the best neo-retro games I’ve ever played.. one of THE best games I’ve ever played in my entire life. Cash Cow DX is by the same developer (who also developed the middling, decent but bleh Sigi) and.. boy, I sure loved that Donut Dodo. I don’t love Cash Cow DX. Or like it at all, really. It’s just an endless series of cheap shots and dick moves that might work if this was an authentic 80s arcade game trying to earn $0.25 per play. Or would it? If I game-overed twenty seconds into my first play of a coin-op, and had no fun at all during that twenty seconds, I think I’d be unlikely to put a second quarter in it. The biggest mistake developers designing ultra-challenging games make is assuming the challenge is the attraction. It’s not. Do you know why someone in 1980 put a quarter into Defender, lasted only a minute, and then put another quarter in it? Because during that one minute, when they weren’t dying, they were blowing sh*t up and having the time of their life. Cash Cow DX, which mashes up elements from Mappy, Mappy Land, Popeye, and Pac-Man, gives players a high body count and plenty of aggravating moments, but without any dynamic gameplay. It’s just flailing against overpowered enemies with too much to collect and not enough means to defend yourself. It feels like a game that forgot somewhere along the way that it’s supposed to be fun, and consequently it’s one of the most miserable experiences I’ve had reviewing an indie game in recent years. A big reason why I’ve moved away from reviewing indies is I don’t like doing reviews like this. It’s not fun for me to tell someone I respect that I hate their game.

In fact, I wouldn’t have even played enough to go forward with the review if I hadn’t taken a review code weeks ago. I played it for a few minutes, hated it, and thought “okay, maybe I’m not feeling it today.” After a few weeks of this, I thought “oh crap, I really am stuck having to play this thing enough to review it.” I couldn’t even get my niece to play the game with me and she’s been asking to help with an indie review for weeks.

Mind you, all this stuff I have talked about and will talk about is on the mode labeled “EASY.” As opposed to what? What could possibly make this harder? Presumably on NORMAL the enemies have projectiles and on HARD the game lights your hands on fire. How the hell did anyone put this down as an EASY mode? I’m guessing that Cash Cow DX is one of those games where the developer forgot that, while they’re in the process of making their game, they’re the best player in the world at their own game. It happens all the time. Developers don’t realize that it makes perfect sense that YOU, the developer, can easily beat a level YOU created that YOU’VE tested 5,000,000 times. Or maybe they only have one or two play testers and they watch them beat stages too easily during their 50th hour of playing. Because they forget that, they begin upping the stakes to make it harder, as if the game was easy in a vacuum. This continues until your own game is fun for you, the developer, who knows exactly what to do, where to go, and what enemies will do. But, you’re going to eventually hand it off to consumers who haven’t devoted their entire lives to the game, and you expect them to have as much fun as you did? Yea, no.

The deaths happen so quickly and so out of nowhere that it’s hard to learn from them and improve. When you’re about to die in a game like Mappy or Pac-Man, you see it coming, and that gives you a chance to imagine where you went wrong. That anticipation is part of the excitement of the genre. The chase matters most. The “chase” elements of Cash Cow DX are limited to tiny bursts due to the most of the things that you die from having been off screen a second or two before you died. This should be re-themed as a horror game because, without hyperbole, I experienced more jump-scares playing this than I did that Blair Witch game. Other times I had to record a clip to figure out where I could have dodged.

The biggest problem with Cash Cow DX is the cheap enemy placement and abilities. I’m guessing most players will die within the first second or two of their first play session when they’re killed by a green fireball that, like you, has the ability to jump across platforms. Players are wired to move right when they start a level. And what do you know? The first enemy is timed to be synced perfectly with the very first platform 90% of players will jump to, in a way that you can’t anticipate even with an arrow warning of it. It screams of a developer who said “this part is too easy. I’ll fix it” for every square inch of the game. No, you didn’t fix it. You broke it, and immediately set a tone of hostility towards players. This feels like a game that isn’t meant to be fun, but rather simply be as difficult as possible.

I’m on one story. The enemy was down on a different story and can’t jump up to my story. I died anyway because it can jump just high enough to kill me from below, and that blue thing next to me is a wall, so I can’t dodge left. Scratching out distance often isn’t even enough. The rules and mechanics are stacked too much in favor of the enemies. Imagine if Pac-Man’s ghosts or Mappy’s cats could kill you when there’s a literal wall and/or story separating you and them. Popeye does it, but you can always see Bluto and work around him, whereas here, enemies move fast and come from off-screen.

I have nothing positive to say about this one. Even the graphics aren’t a net positive because the character sprites are too big, the visible playfield too cramped, the platforms often too small, and the enemies (and you) too fast, which means that almost every death will be something you couldn’t anticipate. When you fall through the floor, you get a very brief grace period of invincibility, but that hardly matters when enemies (who can jump, mind you) are placed on the shallow platforms you’re going to land on (and they can fall through the floor too) and the level layouts are tailored towards trapping you in situations where avoiding enemies is unlikely. The game counts on springing enemies on you when you’ve already committed yourself to an action. Actually, this game shares a lot of DNA with Sonic The Hedgehog. You might not move Sonic-fast, but you’re pretty fast, and so are the enemies, only there’s nothing like Sonic’s rings that allow you to continue when you run into enemies. You die and get moved back to the starting space. So, this is kind of like Sonic as a maze chase, without rings. That sounds awful, and it is.

The worst part of all of this is I genuinely think Cash Cow DX would have been a lot of fun if the game had eased you in during the first cycle of levels instead of just immediately going for the throat. Imagine any of your favorite maze chase games, only if the first couple cycles of levels never existed. Imagine Donkey Kong starting on the third or fourth cycle of levels, with the barrels coming at a continuous stream, or the springs, or the fireballs. Does Donkey Kong still become an all-time cherished classic? Probably not to the same degree. There was absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by making Cash Cow DX so punishing right from the start. It just turns a likely good game into a historically bad one. I’ve been reviewing games for over thirteen years now, and I’ve never played a game with so much potential, with so many seemingly fun ideas that went so far out of its way to prevent fun right out of the starting gate. It made me sad, because it didn’t have to be this way.

And even after factoring-in the fast movement and shallow jumping, Cash Cow DX continued to pile on limitations to further up the challenge. Like, say you’re on a ledge and there’s a ledge below you and you want to, without jumping, just run off the ledge you’re on and fall at an angle to the ledge below you. Well, when you get to the edge, your character will automatically hesitate for a split second, losing most of their forward momentum and preventing you from getting to the platform you wanted. It’s subverting a player’s instinct for the sake of making the game harder, but without adding anything positive to make up for it. Ain’t nobody allowed to have fun on their own terms with this one. It feels like there’s limited potential to craft your own strategies. Again, everything here could have been fun if the difficulty had been toned-down and scaled like a normal coin-op does. Each stage has its own unique gimmick, all of which would normally be a ton of fun, but the enemies have too much of an advantage while you have every conceivable movement disadvantage except the ability to barely jump over an enemy. Frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t work falling deaths into the equation. Because the difficulty is so relentlessly intense, there’s not enough breathing room to actually study and learn the rules to the movement and enemies. This game does not scale. It’s an immediate brick wall that’s presumably followed by taller and thicker brick walls.

Found a bonus stage. Didn’t even realize the game had bonus stages, but it transitioned quickly from the main stage to this before I even realized it happened and then I died in about 0.1 seconds from walking off the edge.

Cash Cow DX is one of the most unlikable indies I’ve ever played in my life. Movement is too loose, jumping too shallow, and there’s not enough “turn the tables” elements to make the chase part fun. One per stage. ONE. Good lord. It’s like the polar opposite of Portal, where its designers used play-testing to fine-tune it to intuitive perfection. Cash Cow feels like it was fine-tuned so that every platform, jump, enemy and obstacle is as mean-spirited as possible. Let’s game this out: what was the benefit to all this? What the f*ck did Cash Cow DX have to gain by making the first series of five levels this ridiculous? Nothing. I have no objection if the second wave of levels was this hard. But the first wave? The best case scenario is that you’ve made a game that fits a VERY small niche market of people who want a Dark Souls-like challenge in every genre. Where “fun” for them is to never be able to relax and smile for a single damn second. If you want an arcade punisher that isn’t specifically enjoyable on its gameplay merits but offers the satisfaction of just surviving, you might actually like this. For everyone else, the GOTCHAs and cheap deaths just make the whole thing pretty boring. I don’t want an arcade game like this where I have to constantly be in a state of caution. Even games that eventually become hard like Pac-Man or Popeye aren’t 100% all intensity all the time right from the start. They ease you into it. There’s no sense of that here. This is like teaching a kid to ride a bike by plopping them on the seat and pushing them into rush hour traffic. Donut Dodo wasn’t easy either, but everything could be seen on screen at once. You were almost never blindsided. This is a game of constant blindsiding, and that’s actually not exciting. It’s just very boring.

I wouldn’t have even seen the last two levels (of five total) if not for the game’s “practice” mode which still uses a life system anyway. Normally I’d keep playing until I finished the whole game, or at least a full cycle, but I actually didn’t feel I was close even after a couple hours of gameplay and I want to be done with this and go back to the projects I’m actually having fun with.

And if I seem mad, I’m really not. I just know Pixel Games is better than this. You can’t make a game as good as Donut Dodo by accident. It has to come from a place of genuine talent. I also know that maze chases are a tougher genre to pull off than people realize. That genre has become such a major part of my gaming existence that, for my site’s 13th birthday, I reviewed 40 different versions of Pac-Man games. I LOVE a good maze chase, but Cash Cow DX violates just about every rule that goes into a fun maze chase. I actually wonder if a Defender-like radar instead of the almost-worthless arrows would have made a difference. Or maybe if the game had utilized a wide screen. Or maybe if the game had not had a confusing “Inertia Mode: Modern/Classic” option. Instead of making two versions of one game, just get one version right, for God’s sake. I don’t know what the difference is between the two. The default is “modern.” I switched to “classic” and it seemed like maybe movement was a little easier, but all the blind jumps and OP enemies were still there. It’s a massive dick move to put an enemy who jumps towards you on a platform with a gap so big that you can’t see what’s on it. The warning arrows were often only indicators I was about to die because they showed up too late. It’s a mean game, and I’m so glad to be done with it. But, for all the hatred I just showed on Cash Cow DX, it was classy that Pixel Games put an option to disable screen flashing. Their next game is a cartoonish tribute to Lunar Lander, one of my all-time favs. Will I be there for it? Yep. Sure, Pixel Games has gone 1 for 3 at IGC, but so what? Do you know what you call someone who bats 1 for 3 in baseball? An all-star. And Pixel Games is an elite developer who made one amazing game and one terrible one. They’ll be back, and I’ll be there when they are.
Verdict: NO!
A Review Copy was supplied for this review. Today, a copy of Cash Cow DX was paid for by me at the discounted launch sale price of $4.79. I also bought my niece Donut Dodo so that she’d have a game that’s fun too.