The Battle Cats is a tower defense game where the player selects a team of cats to fight enemies in multiple settings. The gameplay involves sending a wide roster of cats out onto a 2D battlefield in order to defend a base equipped with a cannon, which is referred to as the "cat base". The cannon is by default a laser cannon but can be developed in order to obtain different effects that use materials collected from SoL (Stories of Legend) to build different abilities such as freeze, slow, knockback, barrier breaker, holy blast (effective against zombies), water blast which is effective against metal enemies who take one damage per hit even if the cat has high damage. Only critical hits cats can damage metal enemies harshly.