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There are entire generations of players who treat the wool-obsessed Bubsy like gaming roadkill. A cautionary yarn from the early ‘90s, when publishers saw Sonic print money and decided every animal with eyebrows deserved a mascot franchise. Even so, I’ve always had a weird soft spot for the bobcat. You see, the Flanders-like parents of my next-door neighbour had chugged the mainstream media Kool-Aid and were convinced that Hedgehog gave everybody light-induced seizures. So, while we totally spin-dashed at my place, in secret, we were stuck with Bubsy at his. And through sheer exposure, I learned to begrudgingly appreciate this little furball’s shtick.
He’s less edgy cool-guy swagger, more Looney Tunes wisecracker, turning to the camera to ask “What could possibly go wrong?” every seven minutes.
In 2026, Bubsy 4D spends barely two hours addressing that very question in exhaustive detail. The answer is quite a bit. and all in a very, very short amount of time. The thing that immediately surprised me about Bubsy 4D is that it isn’t embarrassing. That might sound like faint praise, but considering this series once produced the sort of PlayStation 1 catastrophe that still gets used as a punchline in YouTube retrospectives, simply arriving as a functional 3D platformer is a small miracle.
Developer Fabraz understood the assignment here, mostly. This isn’t an attempt to reinvent Bubsy into some prestige mascot’s mascot. It’s a knowingly mid-tier revival trying to bottle the energy of old-school collectathons while poking fun at the series’ own chequered history. The setup is pure Saturday morning cartoon nonsense. The wool-obsessed Woolies have returned, BaaBots (i.e., cybernetic sheep) are causing havoc, and Bubsy’s beloved Golden Fleece has been pinched. Naturally, our wisecracking bobcat hops across three themed planets to sort things out. There’s Wool World, Art Supply World, and E-Waste World; five stages sewn within each and a boss fight waiting at the end like a mildly irritated sheepdog.
Jumpy jump platforming is the main attraction in this particular solar system. Combat certainly isn’t, but I’ll get to that proverbial litter box shortly. At first glance, Bubsy’s traversal moveset feels surprisingly stacked. You’ve got variable jump height, skid jumps for quick directional pivots, triple jumps, flutter jumps that effectively act as a double jump, gliding, wall jumps, wall scrambling, and a pounce attack that doubles as both a traversal lunge and a combat move. There’s a lot of feline flexibility packed into this fluffy menace.
And honestly, for the first thirty minutes, I was kind of into it.
There’s a scrappy little momentum to Bubsy’s movement that occasionally clicks into place. Chaining a flutter jump into a glide before launching into a pounce to barely clear a gap has a certain bargain-bin thrill to it. It’s not elegant, but it moves. The real gimmick is Hairball Mode, which transforms Bubsy into this sort of rolling, ringworm-dispensing Katamari that lets him zip around levels. Hold R2, and he boosts into overdrive, drifting around corners with all the grace of butter sliding across a hot frying pan. Sometimes this creates genuine excitement, especially during timed sequences where you’re desperately trying to maintain momentum before launching off giant pipes into floating islands overhead.
Other times, it feels like wrestling a shopping trolley with one busted wheel.
Also, rare is the moment when the camera doesn’t have a minor panic attack during Hairball sections. Bubsy 4D absolutely loves slaloming you through curved pipes and corkscrew pathways, but the camera frequently wig-outs as it collides with geometry during high-speed turns. Sometimes it’s a brief flutter. Sometimes it completely torpedoes your sense of direction and sends you careening off-course like a woolly bowling ball. For a mechanic that the game leans on this heavily, it’s pretty clawful.
The bigger issue is that Bubsy 4D never really decides whether it wants precision platforming or chaotic sandbox scrambling. On paper, Bubsy’s expanded moveset should create expressive traversal. In practice, it often feels like the game’s systems are fighting each other. There are invisible limitations governing how many special moves you can chain together during certain sequences, but they don’t always behave consistently. Sometimes I’d accidentally brute force my way around those restrictions by panic-mashing shoulder buttons against walls until Bubsy effectively wall-humped his way past entire sections of intended platforming. It was satisfying in exactly the wrong way.
Meanwhile, other moments became maddening because the moveset rules suddenly decided not to work properly. I’d know exactly what the game wanted from me during a 2.5D side-scrolling sequence, nail the input rhythm, and then watch Bubsy simply refuse to perform one step of the combo chain before plummeting into the abyss. That inconsistency poisons the flow. Good platformers teach trust, whereas Bubsy 4D teaches contingency planning. The shifting perspectives don’t help either. One minute you’re exploring open-ish sandbox spaces, the next the camera swings into the aforementioned side-scrolling mode, or awkward top-down angles. Sometimes these transitions work as palate cleansers, other times they feel like the game is suddenly changing the rules halfway through the obstacle course.
And the levels themselves often lack interaction or energy. There are stretches where it feels less like inhabiting a cohesive world and more like wandering through themed obstacle dioramas. There’s often a dearth of enemies who barely react to your presence, and NPCs loop animations like animatronics waiting for the theme park to close. You’re moving through environments rather than existing inside them. The whole thing has a slightly unfinished woollen jumper quality to it; pull one thread and the seams start showing immediately.
Combat in older Bubsy games was never exactly satisfying. Bubsy would sort of collide with enemies; they’d disappear into a cartoon dust cloud, and everyone moved on with their day. Bubsy 4D somehow manages to feel even flimsier. Enemies mostly exist as soft-lock targets for your pounce attack. Get close enough, tap R2, and Bubsy sort of magnetises into them with barely any impact, sound design, or kinetic feedback.
There’s no chunky hit effects, no satisfying thwack. It’s just enemies vanishing like somebody quietly unplugged them from The Matrix.
After about twenty minutes, I stopped engaging with regular combat almost entirely because avoiding enemies was simply more enjoyable than fighting them. Boss battles fare slightly better from a structural standpoint, but not a mechanical one. There are only three in total, each built around multi-phase encounters involving dodging projectile patterns or avoiding arena hazards before exploiting some gimmick weakness. One memorable example sees Bubsy blasting himself from a cannon while in Hairball Mode like an oversized fur-covered cannonball, which should feel amazing. Instead, most boss hits land with the dramatic energy of pegging a tennis ball through wet cardboard; big setup for a tiny payoff.
Visually, Bubsy 4D lands squarely in indie territory. Calling it ugly would be unfair, while calling it impressive would be generous. My immediate thought was that it resembles the upper-tier creations people used to build inside Dreams on PlayStation 4; it’s ambitious, hobbyist energy, and charming ideas, most definitely not operating anywhere near Nintendo’s postcode. The cel-shaded character models are serviceable enough, although Bubsy and friends spend much of the game wearing dead-eyed expressions while their lips flap with all the emotional nuance of sock puppets. Cutscenes begin fully voiced before abruptly switching to JRPG-style text boxes accompanied by isolated character grunts. It’s jarring every single time.
Environment variety is also thinner than a bargain-bin blanket, with levels designed with the three world themes in mind. That’s a paltry-sized scratching post if you’ve just paid full whack and expect to dig your nails into something substantial. Each world repeats visual motifs heavily, the abstract floating-island geometry often feels more utilitarian than imaginative, and the skyboxes looked like somebody smeared Vaseline directly onto my TV set. Still, there’s occasional charm buried underneath the budget constraints. Some of the knitted highways and giant art-supply structures have a toybox quality that suits Bubsy’s cartoon tone.
And I’ll admit, a few unlockable costumes genuinely got a laugh out of me. ‘Classic Shirt’ Bubsy is a given acquisition. The deliberately horrifying polygon-perfect Bubsy 3D skin is a strong self-own. And then there’s a ‘Hedgehog Style’ outfit that gives Bubsy Sonic-esque shoes while blurring out his junk, which is pretty deranged, especially given he’s trying this stuff on in front of his niece and nephew. Somebody probably should’ve workshopped that a bit longer.
Performance on PlayStation 5 Pro is mostly stable, but technical jank still creeps in around the edges. I clipped through geometry more than once, got trapped inside scenery, and encountered checkpoint death loops three separate times. Bubsy would respawn mid-fall, immediately die again, then repeat the process forever in a pussy cat purgatory. Restarting the level entirely was the only fix.
“What could possibly go wrong?” indeed.
There’s a version of Bubsy 4D that almost works. You can see the outline of it whenever the movement briefly clicks, whenever a Hairball sequence builds genuine speed, or whenever the game leans into its own ridiculousness instead of trying to mimic better platformers. Fabraz clearly understands 3D platformers on some level; there are flashes of smart traversal design buried under the fluff. But those flashes never fully weave together. The camera constantly unravels momentum, combat is softer than freshly knitted mittens, and platforming systems behave inconsistently enough that mastery feels unreliable. And while the game’s shorter runtime might have worked in its favour if the experience was tightly focused, finishing the main campaign in barely over two hours isn’t acceptable.
Mind you, that put my completion rate at 57%. Collectathon fans can squeeze more out of it, but I doubt you’ll feel compelled to fully clean up these worlds because the reward structure mostly boils down to movement upgrades that are largely nonessential. That’s the real issue. Bubsy 4D isn’t offensively bad. In fact, compared to this franchise’s history, it’s borderline respectable. But respectability isn’t enough in a genre currently sharing shelf space with Astro Bot, Yooka-Replaylee, and a thriving indie platformer scene full of games that understand momentum, spectacle, and polish on a much deeper level.
This is only a decent proof-of-concept wrapped around a middling platformer that was in desperate need of tighter stitching. Bubsy’s finally landed on his feet again, it’s such a shame he immediately stepped onto a rake afterwards.