Tom and Jerry Chase is a free to play Gacha Game based on the Tom and Jerry series developed by Net Ease Games and launched in China for iOS and Android devices in 2019.
It is an asymmetric competitive multiplayer 2D side-scroller game in a vein similar to Dead by Daylight: A team of four mice try to evade the pursuit of one cat as they attempt to steal five wedges of cheese and then escape the house by breaking open a crack in a wall, with the mice winning if two of them manage to escape. Meanwhile the cat is trying to knock out and capture the mice, where they can attempt to dispose of them by tying the mice to rockets that will eventually launch, dispatching the mouse from the game, with the cat winning if it can dispatch three of the mice, or if time runs out.
While the game is currently exclusive to Asia, the broader Asian version of the game does contain English language options and is playable in other regions.
Tom and Jerry Chase contains examples of the following tropes:
- Age Lift: Syrus, who was a kitten in his original appearance, appears as a playable cat in a fully grown form.
- Agony of the Feet: One of the longer forms of stun generally takes the form of this, although some characters have slightly different animations for it. Any character hit by this kind of stun drops what they were holding. A lesser example is various fragments that are left behind by thrown items; stepping on them doesn't do any damage, but does stun the player for a short time.
- Air-Vent Passageway: Several maps feature these which can be used to travel a far distance across the map, with a cooldown before the next player can use that same vent again, making for a decent way for a mouse to put a little space between them and a cat in pursuit, albeit not a flawless means as the cat can attack the vent and still damage the mouse while it’s in transit. While some of the tunnels aren’t literally air vents due to the theming of some maps, they do all generally still play the same air vent animation when in use.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Character skins are the primary big ticket item, with fancy S skins being found in gachas and as rewards for the paid tier of the Chase Pass.
- Angry Guard Dog: Spike can appear as an obstacle in maps; when he's awake he will charge after any player he sees, mouse or cat alike, grabbing them and throwing them a distance which will inflict a large stun on them.
- Anti-Rage Quitting: If a player disconnects from a match and doesn't reconnect to the match, or if a player goes afk during a match, they will be penalized a special stat called Karma. Karma is recovered over time and by playing matches without disconnects and maintaining high karma entitles a player to bonus rewards while having low karma will prohibit a player from playing certain game modes.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: While cats usually need to put mice into a weakened state by reducing their health to zero before they can catch them to tie to a rocket, the flyswatter and some skills, especially as the bonus effect added to them at level 3, put mice into a special stun that if the cat follows up on with their claw attack, will immediately catch the mice, bypassing the weakened state which in turn gets around the "Blood of Iron" perk card.
- Asymmetric Multiplayer: Four mice are trying to pull of a cheese heist while one cat tries to stop them.
- Auto-Revive: Angel Jerry can grant this as a buff to a mouse about to be dispatched; once dispatched they respawn back on the map and can continue playing, however they will immediately be eliminated once they get knocked out one more time. Pecos also has the effect of his level 3 passive to once per game automatically be restored to full health if his health would have reached zero.
- Beach Episode: The Beach Volleyball casual mode, which pits two teams of one cat and two mice each against each other to bounce a volleyball around and score points while interfering with each other by throwing items at each other.
- Boom in the Hand: Once a stick or bundle of dynamite is lit, it will automatically explode after a set time, which can easily be in the hands of a player, especially since thrown dynamite is automatically caught and held by any player it "hits".
- Cartoon Cheese: To gather five wedges of classic cartoon cheese and push them through the mouse holes is the primary objective of the game.
- Catch and Return: Since thrown lit dynamite gets caught automatically, it's important to be mindful of the timing when using it, as throwing it with too much time left on the fuse gives one's opponent ample time to react by using this trope.
- Cheesy Moon: The Space Fortress map features a cheese mine in reference to various space themed shorts that have invoked this trope.
- Climactic Music: The final phase of the match, the Wall Crack Phase, has its own high energy music
, overriding both the the regular and chase stage music, setting the mood that it’s do or die for both sides to make the final push for victory. - Combat and Support: Mice can be classified by four roles; the combat role of Distract, the primary objective role of Cheese, and the supportive roles of Rescue and Assist. It's generally recommended a team of mice contain a balance of all four roles, and the preparation screen will warn the mice if their team composition is lacking in one particular role.
- Decomposite Character: While the female character in The Zoot Cat is identified to simply be a different design for the established character Toots, she is here treated as her own distinct character from Toots named Zuri.
- Dinner Deformation: Butch's cake eating animation has him swallow the entire thing, plate included, in one bite as the shape of it is seen going down his throat.
- Don't Wake the Sleeper:
- The Night Castle maps, based on the Mouseketeer shorts features a bedroom (or two) in which sleeps the king from Royal Cat Nap. If his sleep is disturbed either by hitting him with an item or jumping on him, he will wake up and start shouting, damaging everyone in the bedroom and lighting up on the mini-map.
- Spike can be found sleeping in the Classic House, Night Castle and Summer Cruise maps. Running past him will wake him up, and he will grab and throw whoever's in his path, stunning them.
- The Door Slams You: The mouse perk card “You Shall Not Pass” adds this effect to when the mouse opens or closes a door, albeit to any other player who happens to be near, cat and mouse alike.
- Excuse Plot: While the justification for needing an alternate means of escape is sound due to the cheese blocking off all the mouse holes, the justification for the spawning of the wall crack is simply an earthquake that happens to happen when all the cheese is pushed through that damages a wall.
- Fog of War: At the start of the match, the mice's minimaps are obscured from view until one of them explores the area to reveal it. The first minute of the round, the Scouting Phase, revolves around the mice remote control piloting robot mice with the primary goal being to reveal the map and find the objectives before the actual main gameplay starts. Meanwhile, the cat always has the full minimap revealed to them and is free to spend the Scouting Phase however they like, from setting up traps in advance for the mice, to hunting down the robot mice directly to destroy them and hinder the mice's preparations.
- Food as Bribe: If a player manages to attack and knock out Spike, he will drop a bone that when thrown will summon Tyke, who will cheer on and support whoever summoned him as well as hit the summoner's opponents.
- Friendly Fireproof: This is normally the case for most items and attacks in the game, however the chance to hurt an ally is a usage risk of the dynamite and ice cube.
- Frying Pan of Doom: Tom's second weapon is a frying pan he can use to do big close range damage, bat away items, and even throws a fried egg that blinds any mice it hits.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Some of the playable cats include characters who seem unlikely to be participating in the act of hunting mice, such as Cooper and Angel Tom; the former of whom condemned Tom to hell for hunting mice, and the latter of which who is Tom's conscience always arguing for friendship with mice.
- Gathering Steam: Several cats with particularly glaring weaknesses can overcome some of them with their skill level ups, such as Meathead being able to supplement his Mighty Glacier stats by boosting his speed with his pepper. Often such characters need to prioritize getting at least one level up from the exp cakes in Scouting Phase to get up to speed as quick as possible.
- Glass Cannon:
- Butch has the highest attack stat of any cat in the game, with passives that boost his strength even further until he gains a chance to one shot any mouse, but that comes at the cost of very low health, leading him to be easily knocked out if he isn't careful.
- Mice that can get into conflict with cats are classified as "Distract" for a reason; very few of these mice are capable of easily winning a fight with a cat and rely on stuns and evasive skills to simply keep the cat busy. If they do slip up and take damage from the cat, they tend to fall just as easily as any other mouse.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: All three of Tom, Jerry and Tuffy have playable Angel and Devil alts, with Angel Jerry being the only one of the six not based on some form of this trope throughout the franchise history.
- G-Rated Drug: Bottles of perfume. If a player is hit by it, or steps in the puddle left when the bottle is thrown on the ground, they suffer an Interface Screw, reversing their controls while their character's animations change which very much looks like they are stumbling about in a drunken stupor.
- Gravity Screw: The Space Fortress map features outdoor areas in which gravity is significantly lowered and indoor areas where gravity is normal.
- Harmless Freezing: Ice cubes when thrown at a player will freeze them temporarily, opening them up to a follow up attack or simply a chance for the mice to escape from the cat if the cat gets frozen.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: One of the cat exclusive items at their disposal is a mousetrap they can set wherever they like which can trap whatever steps on it for a long stun time, but the cat themselves can also set their own mouse trap off if they aren't careful unless they equip the Cautious perk.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: The main healing items in the game are saucers of milk for a small heal and plates of cake for a large heal.
- Invisibility: A useful buff for both cat and mouse to either get the drop on or avoid the other. Available to everyone through invisibility potions that spawn on the map, but also several characters are capable of making themselves invisible with their skills, such as Cooper and Detective Jerry.
- Item Caddy: Some characters specialize in manipulating the items that appear on the map in various ways, such as:
- Cooper, who can conjure random items on demand.
- Devil Tuffy, who can levitate and clone items.
- Michelle, who can shapeshift into a fully functional copy of an item other players can use.
- Angel Tom, who can draw in items to use as an Orbiting Particle Shield.
- Jack of All Stats: A new player will be starting with just the base Tom and Jerry as their usable playable cat and mouse respectively. As the two free starter units, they both sport well balanced stats.
- Lightning Bruiser:
- Lighting, appropriately enough, features one of the highest speed stats of any cat in the game, with passives that boost it even further and a Flash Step that can lock onto nearby mice, making him very difficult to run away from.
- Syrus takes a different approach from Lightning. He can't teleport, but after getting a running start he accelerates into a fast run that electrifies his body and alters his attacks into dash attacks, allowing him to cover a lot of ground and hit hard while he's at it, stunning the mice with his electricity to slow them down for follow up attacks.
- Me's a Crowd: Topsy and Detective Tuffy both have the ability to create a double of themselves. The former uses their double offensively as an AI controlled partner that can hunt mice on its own, while the latter uses theirs defensively, becoming invisible when they create the double as a decoy for the cat to chase instead of them.
- Metropolis Level: The appropriately named Metropolis Map, modeled primarily off of New York City as depicted in Mouse in Manhattan.
- Monkey King Lite: Jerry's S Skin "Mouse King" features him dressed up as the monkey king himself, replacing his hammer attack animation with Sun Wukong's iconic staff.
- Mouse Trap: A useful tool for cats to use. While they do take a bit of time to set up, once in place they'll snap down on anything that steps on it, trapping them for a lengthy duration of time and giving away the position on the cat's minimap. Of course, a cat that isn't careful can end getting caught in their own mousetrap, but the perk card Cautious can render a cat immune to this happening to them.
- Multi-Slot Character: Rounding out the cast of playable characters are a variety of alternate forms of Tom, Jerry and Tuffy inspired by various shorts and films, such as a set of musketeer versions for all three depicting them as they appeared in The Two Mouseketeers.
- Named by the Adaptation: The game features a wide variety of playable cats and mice from a wide range of the franchise's history; some of which never had any given names in their original appearances and thus have been named for the first time here. A few examples include:
- Cooper, the conductor of the Heavenly Express from 1949 short Heavenly Puss.
- Kate, a female cat Tom became smitten with from the 1952 short Smitten Kitten.
- Syrus, the calico kitten from the 1964 short The Unshrinkable Jerry Mouse
- Nipper, Jerry's prank playing friend from the 1969 short The Year of the Mouse.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: The Robot Mice used in the Scouting Phase can be destroyed by just about anything, giving some particular skills and items a chance to shine, such as the golf ball which doesn't do much damage, but bounces around with a hitbox that remains active for a long time. The mice themselves aren't that much better depending on matchups, but the average cat like Tom can take out an average mouse like Jerry in only two claw attacks.
- Original Generation: The mice Miko and Celeste are wholly original to the game and not based on any character that has appeared in the franchise beforehand.
- Oxygen Meter: The Forest Ranch map contains a sizable lake containing a sunken ship. Players have to be careful not to stay in the lake too long as once their oxygen meters run out they'll take damage and become weakened.
- Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Cousin Muscles, true to the source, sports one of the highest attack ratings of any mouse in the game, with a rage mechanic that can buff his attack even further, allowing him to knock back a cat to aid a mouse's escape at worse, or gain the potential to one hit KO quite a few cats at best.
- Power at a Price: Some of the perk cards provide their benefits at some drawback, such as the "Cautious" perk making cats immune to taking damage from stepping on glass shards or mousetraps, but slowing down their overall movement speed.
- Powerup Food: During the scouting phase there are five special EXP cakes that only exist during this phase that provide a sizable amount of exp when collected. While the cat can consume and benefit from them immediately, the robot mice have to survive to the end of the scouting phase to return the cakes to the mice first, creating a fight for the best starting position as the cat can get experience for both destroying a robot mouse and from eating any exp cakes it happened to have in its inventory, with the potential for one side to start the match with up to a 4 level lead on the other if they played a perfect scouting phase.
- Premium Currency: Diamonds are the main cash currency. If you can't buy things outright with diamonds, you can buy whatever other currency you need with diamonds.
- Press X to Not Die: While a mouse is being carried by a cat, they can mash a button to fill a struggle meter which will free them from the cat's grip. While tied to a rocket they can periodically play the same minigame to either add 5/10 seconds to the fuse timer, or very rarely to struggle free from the rocket.
- Promoted to Playable: A few characters appeared in the game at launch in various places besides as a playable character before making their proper debuts, such as Cousin Muscles who hosts the mouse tutorial, and Fairy Godmother who hosts the Magic Mirror gacha.
- Puppet Fighter: Jerry's Magician cousin is capable of pulling a rabbit out of his hat. The rabbit can be instructed to perform various tasks such as pushing cheese or rescuing mice tied to rockets, giving Magician the ability to multi task.
- Rank Inflation: Ranked tiers start at Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond, then go on from there into Legendary and Overlord.
- Reduced to Dust: While the default animation for taking explosive damage is the body becomes soot covered and they shake it off, a few characters (versions of Tom and Jerry in particular) have a custom animation where they crumble into a pile of dust first then reform themselves.
- Rewards Pass: The Chase Battle Pass, which can be leveled up by doing various daily and weekly quests to grant various rewards, with big ticket skins available for purchasing the upgraded golden pass.
- See the Invisible: With invisibility buffs being extremely valuable for both sides to either avoid or sneak up on the other, it becomes a useful skill to watch out for the telltale signs of an invisible player, from the various items on the ground being moved around by a player running by, to the small dust clouds that are kicked up when a player jumps.
- Skill Scores and Perks: Each playable character has three usable skills: A passive skill, an active skill, and a weapon. As a match progresses the two sides can earn experience points for their actions and level up from 1-10, with each level up giving them a skill point they can assign to level up one of their three skills from 0-3. In addition, each player can acquire various perk cards from a gacha that they can equip to their character to give them permanent passive effects during the match.
- Social Deduction Game: The "Aliens" mini-game, where players are divided into two teams: aliens aiming to knock out the earthlings, and earthlings trying to expose and dispatch the aliens.
- Songs in the Key of Panic: As far as the mice are concerned at least, the regular stage music shifts to a more tense chase music whenever the cat and the mouse are in proximity of each other and aware of it.
- Squishy Wizard: Cooper has an extremely unique ability to fast travel the map, keep tabs on the movements of the mice, and a special invisibility buff on top of all that, with below average stats all around. While his passive growths will start to offset his low stats, his low health will remain an issue that can lead to him being easily knocked out if he isn't careful.
- Stairway to Heaven: Gatekeeper Cooper from Heavenly Puss has the ability to conjure the escalator to the Heavenly Express featured in that short as his own personal Home Base from which he can eat to recover health, and teleport back to the map to any room he desires.
- Strapped to a Rocket: This is the means by which a cat can eliminate a mouse from the game; Rockets spawn in with a 60 second fuse and when the fuse runs out, the mouse tied to it is dispatched from the match. The timer on a rocket remains persistent and each time a cat manually ties a mouse to it the fuse immediately gets 10 seconds taken off of it, requiring mice to coordinate a rescue plan to prevent the cat from simply recatching the mice over and over and helping it dispatch a mouse even faster than if it were just left on the rocket. While on the rocket a mouse can occasionally struggle to increase the timer on it by 5-10 seconds, or even very rarely to break free on their own.
- Suddenly Speaking: Jerry actually gets quite a bit of text only dialog in the initial tutorial until the narrative adds Muscles to take over most of the tutorial. Meanwhile, Tom immediately has Joan and Lightning to do all the speaking for him on the cat side of the tutorials and thus doesn't talk.
- Support Party Member: One of the four categories of mice is Assist. Mice in this class often dedicate a large part of their skill set to supporting others, such as Pecos who can boost the stats of mice near him with his passive, and heal them with his weapon.
- Tactical Door Use: Even without the "You Shall Not Pass" perk allowing to to be used as an attack, utilizing the doors on some maps has many useful applications, from slowing down a cat in pursuit, preparing an attack on the cat in pursuit who can't see the other side of the closed door, to using it as an alert system, as a door being opened will not just make a sound, but also a visual indicator on the screen. The only drawback is doors will break and become unusable once they've been closed and opened too many times.
- Throw the Book at Them: Kate's weapon is to throw a book that will sit on the ground with its pages open that she can then trigger to snap shut on any mice that step on it, functioning like her own special kind of mousetrap.
- Total Party Wipe: While the cat only needs to dispatch three of the four mice to win, if the fourth mouse is also tied to a rocket when the third is dispatched, the cat will get credit for achieving this trope and a higher score.
- Unusable Enemy Equipment: While most items can be used by either side, only the cat can pick up and/or utilize the flyswatter, the repair hammer, the gumball machine and the mousetrap. Meanwhile, the cat can drink the transform potion but don't get anywhere near the same effect the mice do and, besides Butch, can't directly interact with the cheese.
- We Win, Because You Didn't: This is how the cat wins. They can actively win by dispatching three mice, denying them their two must escape win condition, but they will also be declared the winner by default when time runs out.
- Wheel of Feet: Speed boost buffs are represented with this type of effect on the character's legs.
- You Shall Not Evade Me: Tom's mouse grabber and Tara's lasso are both ranged weapons that can catch a mouse and pull them back to the cat in question.
