 |
| Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! |
An old-school platformer about a sassy pink-haired catgirl launches on PC, 360 and PS3 for $15. In this day and age, it sounds like commercial suicide. It's played out already on so many levels. Not only that, but it couldn't possibly be good, could it? If the revival of a well-loved series like Rocket Knight can turn out to be a damp squib, what chance has this one got? Well, in the name of scientific fairness, I gave Blade Kitten a little stab. And then a great many more. Hop, skip and double-jump for my thoughts and a trailer.
The download is finished, installation is complete. I start up the game (PS3 version). I brace for impact, this is going to be terrible. I must fully admit that I went into this one with VERY low expectations. And here's the trailer, just to get you probably in a similar frame of mind.
An hour later, having beaten (but by no means completed) the first two levels, I say out loud to myself "Bloody hell, it's Strider dressed up as a doofy saturday morning cartoon series!". All the elements are there on both sides of the equation. Wall-crawling freedom, ceiling-dangling exploration, combat that feels fundamentally badass yet largely boils down to mashing the attack button as enemies fly spectacularly offscreen, and a story that feels like early-2000s mangasploitation meets classic action-adventure cartooning, right down to the sassy heroine and the cute alien animal mascot character. One thing of note is that this is planned to be an episodic adventure, but this particular story arc will wrap up in Episode 2, which (according to the developers) is already 95% complete.
As you've probably figured from the trailer above, Blade Kitten is the story of Kit Ballard, a pink haired, pink tailed cliche with a techno-magical floating sword. She flies around the galaxy beating up villains and getting paid for it, and calls this a job. This mission seems to have gone slightly pear-shaped, though, as her bounty-authorization has been stolen by a rival Breaker (spacey bounty huntery types), who also went and blew up her spaceship. So, in order to get paid, and to buy a new ride, she's off on a quest to recover the item and look good doing so. A little aside - Blade Kitten is actually based off of a short run of a comic series by the lead designer. Apparently published in Australia (where the devs, Krome studios, are based) quite some time back. The game takes place as a prequel arc, set a few years before the events in the comics.
Initial impressions are made by the graphics and presentation. There's a catchy theme-tune that works in pseudo-asian elements into a toe-tapping beat, the characters look quite detailed (in a particularly retro-faux-manga sorta way), and the dialogue, while corny, isn't bad. The in-game graphics are solid, if not amazing. The levels themselves are respectably detailed, and the cel-shaded style brings the vital elements to the foreground quite nicely. The backdrops are of particular note, though, being a mixture of huge polygon constructs stretching out into the back layers (sometimes teleportable to) and pretty hand-painted vistas. If I had to pick out one particular gripe, it's that all versions (even the PC build) are capped to 30fps maximum. It's hard to shake the feeling that things could be moving a little more smoothly, and the limit is largely artificial.
The core gameplay will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played the old Capcom arcade/home console hit Strider. While there's somewhat more inertia and weight behind Kits movements, the fundamentals are the same. She can run fast, jump high, and adhere almost perfectly to any surface, wall and ceiling alike. The few surfaces that are too slippery to stick to can be used by driving her sword into their surface and using it as a springboard to leap to new heights. The 2d platforming standards are here. Double-jumping, wall-springing, a dash button to sprint past obstacles or make enormous running leaps, and a simple but intuitive combat system that largely revolves around a single button. Mash to swing your sword, hold to block, dash + attack to perform a special move (after a kill streak), and a couple more moves. Your list of abilities never grows beyond this point, and while you can buy upgrades to health, stamina (for dashing) and weapon power, they're entirely optional and largely for flavour.
The key point where this game diverges from Strider is the scale of the levels. They are ENORMOUS. This cannot be understated. While the path to the end of each of the 14 levels in this expedition can be reached in 10-15 minutes if you're in a hurry, that would be missing a lot of the point. Each level contains literally dozens of secret areas, treasure-rooms and similar nooks and crannies, and I'd estimate that it would take at least an hour to clear out most stages. On the first level alone, there is an enormous aerial section filled with moving high-tech barges filled with loot that you could miss out on entirely, as the main thrust of the level takes place all at ground level or below. If you find yourself at all susceptible to the siren call of shiny loot objects (which are converted into cash, which you spend on character upgrades or alternate costumes), there's a lot to like here.
It all adds up to the game having a decent shelf-life for a $15 title. Despite it only being the first half of the story (and ending on a cliffhanger - you have been warned), there's no shortage of content, and levels can be returned to at any time to explore areas that you missed. There's no multiplayer, and no pretension to being anything more than what it is - a simple, entertaining throwback to 90s SNES/Genesis-era gaming.
It's not entirely sunshine, flowers and kittens though. There's some technical roughness at points. Sometimes enemies will end up stopping in awkward positions between foreground and background, meaning that you can't hit them, but they can shoot at you. Fortunately not much of an issue, as a single enemy is about as threatening as an upturned turtle, but it's one of several minor technical foibles. Occasionally, scripting will glitch out a little - I managed to beat up one particular boss so hard that it failed to animate its escape animation properly, and just kinda vanished without a trace. There's also the occasional bit of confusion between the foreground and background, with the red mushroom-like mines being the worst offender. One of the most damaging obstacles in the game, but only the one in the 'center' lane can hurt you, or be removed. So sometimes it'll look like it's dangerous when it's totally clear, or vice versa.
Those aren't all of the technical quirks I encountered, but it's a shortlist. It's not the most polished game, but I also never encountered anything close to gamebreaking, and only once or twice did glitches kill me. Thankfully, generous checkpointing and a regenerating health system mean that it seldom frustrates for long. Difficulty-wise, I breezed through most levels quite quickly and with very few deaths, but this seems to be because most of the platforming challenges are out of sight, in the hidden areas of the levels. Just getting to the end of each stage is easy, but you'll have to put your thinking cap on and work on your running and jumping skills if you want to grab all the money-chips, treasure-chests, and goldfishes-in-bags (a firm favourite of catgirls, one would presume). The game keeps a running tally of what treasures you've found in each level, too, so you know roughly where you're missing things.
Blade Kitten isn't going to change anything. It's not big and it's not clever. However, it is fun, cheap, quite lengthy and replayable, and a pleasant reminder of a simpler time in gaming, when all you really needed was a jump button and a 'bash baddies' button. I don't regret paying for this game one bit, and will be putting my money down on the next chapter as soon as it releases. While workmanlike in most respects, there are some elements of rather inspired design at points, including a particularly nightmarish level that makes fantastic use of the 3D camera, while still limiting gameplay to a 2D plane. If nothing else, I recommend trying the demo, available on all platforms.
Verdict: Simple, retro, highly enjoyable. Probably worth the $15.
0 comments:
Post a Comment