Thirteen1

Written By: Scott Malthouse

Of course, there have been sillier concepts for a videogame hero. After all, who would have thought a worm wearing a white suit and toting a 1950’s ray gun would have been a success? It’s a shame then that, although a fun idea, Blade Kitten is a decidedly average affair that fails to deliver an exciting experience, while having ‘just’ enough going for it to warrant a play through.

Taking obvious influences from Japanese anime in its colourful style and goofy tone, Blade Kitten follows the story of Kit Ballard, a pink tailed felinesque bounty hunter who is pursuing her blonde and incredibly annoying enemy, Justice, after she stole Kit’s Breaker key and destroyed her ship.
The story is full of twists, but you may be disappointed when you don’t meet that all important cliff-hanger at the end when ‘to be continued’ comes up on the screen. Because of this it’s hard to become invested in the story and therefore difficult to muster up any sense of need to see how the rest of it plays out in the next instalment.

But, being a platformer, you can easily forgive it for not having a story worthy of the Booker Prize, since the meat of the experience is in the gameplay itself. You guide Kit through a sci-fi setting full of cliffs, wall-mounted flamethrowers, industrial-sized fans and, of course, enemies.
The levels themselves allow for some exploration, being quite large both vertically and horizontally, but are ultimately linear in nature. There are some simple puzzles to solve to be able to get from A to B, mostly in the form of finding a switch to turn off a laser so you can pass through safely without being fried. Still, these little problems help break up level monotony, although they only offer a small amount of aid in this respect.

Although you can perform some nifty aerial acrobatics and quick manoeuvres, Blade Kitten soon becomes repetitive, especially where combat is involved. It could have worked so well. Basically you have a floating sword following you that you can use for close quarters attacks or long ranged assaults. You can take out a few enemies by chucking the blade, which can be cool to watch as they are all floored like bowling pins, but fighting eventually comes down to repeat attacks without variety. If there were different combat animations and combos then this part could have been a whole lot more exciting, rather than just being a whole lot of button-mashing. Sometimes you can be overpowered by hordes of enemies, most of which look like they’re dressed in Halo’s Spartan armour, as they spam you with gunshots. You can block, but when you’re surrounded by enemies you’re going to have to let your guard down sometime, and that’s when you take a beating, so be prepared to run away from fights.

As you adventure through this 2D world you will, like all good platformers, be collecting some floating currency. In Blade Kitten this is Hex, which can be used to upgrade Kit’s health and stamina as well as letting you buy new blades and costumes. This RPG-lite aspect of the game is a nice addition, but you shouldn’t have too much trouble finishing it without the need to boost your stats. Still, the promise of new costumes and weapons mixes things up and adds something for you to work towards.

Blade Kitten sports some well-polished visuals and the animations are beautifully fluid, although some of the scenery looks a tad blocky. Cinematic cut-scenes are dotted around and come complete with better-than-average voice acting, although you better be prepared for some cheesy lines, especially when Kit and Justice are vocally sparring. The humour is charming while not being laugh out loud material, and there are some nods to gaming lingo thrown in, like when Kit cries “Epic win!” when succeeding at something, and “Fail” when getting killed.

If you want generic platforming with a few light puzzles and acrobatics then you could do worse than Blade Kitten. It has a certain innocent charm to it that sort of makes you want to forgive it for its shortcomings. It’s not a particularly bad game, nor is it a particularly good game. If you can look past the tedious combat and unfulfilling story, there’s no reason why you can’t enjoy Blade Kitten, if only for a few sittings.

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