An addictive 80's-style arcade game that feels 100% era accurate and is genuinely fun to play if you're a genre fan. It's also extremely challenging in a very fair way.

While I enjoyed Donut Dodo a little more this is a worthy follow up from pixel games and shows it wasn't a fluke. The scoring system feels similar to Donut Dodo while technically working it a different way, but like Donut Dodo playing to get a higher score also significantly helps you finish the game as well since you get more lives playing that way.

Both systems rely on speed and strategic routing to get a higher score but it works in different ways. With Donut Dodo it's mainly about getting the donuts in a certain order determined by RNG and doing it faster so your bonus score based on time. In Cash Cow it's based on collecting money and there is much more to collect, and the order in which you get it doesn't matter but the scoring is based on a combo/multiplier system.

The multiplier increases the more you collect but decreases over time if you stop collecting money, so the incentive is to pick a route that involves you constantly collecting money to keep the combo at the maximum multiplier. But unlike Donut Dodo you have more options to optimise your score, with Gems causing a "Happy Hour" state that multiplies your score by an extra 4x on top of the potential 10x. There are usually some gems that are always there but some will appear and disappear sporadically.

The Pick Axe allows you to access a bonus stage in each level where you can get an extra 100k points. You get an extra life every 100k point and getting all five of them increases your score even more at the end of the game. On top of that the axe can be used to kill all of the enemies on the screen who you usually avoid like Pacman when the ghosts go blue, which like Pacman can greatly increase your score. Finishing the bonus stage allows you to use the pick axe twice though the second time it will fade away in time.

With this is in mind Cash Cow has many more options in terms of getting an optimal score than Donut Dodo which is simple by comparison, but Donut Dodo's more RNG like nature in collecting Donuts makes each run feel a little different. In Cash Cow you will be playing it the same way over and over again once you have found an optimal strategy, while in Donut Dodo there is a heavier focus of avoiding enemies with the trade off of finishing the game and getting a higher score by collecting the donuts creating a more risk reward scenario. In Cash Cow playing for score doesn't lead to you dying more, it just helps with more lives while in Donut Dodo playing for score is very risky you are taking a longer path that can lead to more deaths.

That is the main reason I prefer Donut Dodo despite Cash Cow being technically more deep in terms of scoring options, with Cash Cow playing for score and finishing the game involves no difference in play while in Donut Dodo the two are at odds making risk reward choices more common. In that way Donut Dodo is more deep despite being more simple. That is also why the higher difficulty level in Cash Cow doesn't feel that different compared to Donut Dodo, the enemies and mini games are a little faster but you are mainly failing because your timing is a bit off from being conditioned to them moving slower on Easy rather than them being genuinely harder.

But regardless that doesn't make cash Cow a bad game, it's still a very fun game that I enjoyed playing over and over again until I finished it in the same way I did for Donut Dodo. Like Donut Dodo it feels like a lost classic from the early 80s with Pixel games clearly understanding what made those old game great and what made the classics in particular age so well. It's well worth the asking price and great to pick up and play in short bursts.