Blade Kitten (X360, PS3) (2010)
Developer: Krome

Review by Faididi and Co.

Stick with comics and anime for your catgirl fix

Story: Average

Krome's Blade Kitten is based on Steve Stamatiadis' comics of the same name. The heroine, Kit, is a charismatic bounty hunter catgirl in a sci-fi fantasy future filled with adventure and quirky characters. She has just arrived at the world of Hollow Wish in pursuit of a bounty, only to run into more trouble than expected. Whatever great storytelling found in the comics isn't apparent here, however. The thin plot sends Kit through half-random, almost disconnected events, and the supporting characters have mostly fleeting roles.

Gameplay: Poor

Blade Kitten is a side-scrolling action platformer that loosely resembles Capcom's Strider, as Kit can keep slashing with her blade weapon while walking, jumping, and climbing along walls or ceilings. Unlike that arcade classic, this game is very lenient, because Kit has rengenerating life as well as infinite lives, and she can freely retry from the checkpoints if she gets zapped in the face too many times or if she takes a dive into a fire trap. Curiously, there are no bottomless pits. A shop system accessed via the subscreen lets our heroine purchase upgrades, and the 13 huge levels contain lots of hidden money caches.

Although that all sounds fantastic at first, Blade Kitten is plagued by aggravating flaws in its most basic controls and physics. Kit's horribly sluggish climbing movements and the ambiguous-looking terrain make exploring the levels a massive pain in the ass. The fact that she can't swing up directly through platforms and must slowly transition around ceiling corners is bad enough, but she fails to cling onto surfaces with alarming frequency, due to glitches in her double-jumps and simple drops. Breakable blocks are often clumsily placed in a manner that results in Kit losing her grip while hacking them apart, and sliding into narrow corners will cause her to become stuck.

Not helping are the weak area and enemy designs. The levels consist largely of cookie-cutter chambers and tunnels. Even the nightmare scene recycles the same environmental objects, merely turning them on their sides but playing hardly any differently. The vast majority of the bad guys are the same red soldiers and worm monsters repeated over and over again.

Controls: Sucks All Ass

The floaty, unresponsive controls are really bad. Kit's sprinting feels more like an ice cube sliding over a wet surface, and the long-jump maneuver suffers from a bizarre lag of two seconds. The double-jumping is inconsistent, and clinging onto ceilings is frustratingly unreliable. Kit can't crouch (already a glaring omission for any serious action platformer), yet the lack of a margin in the analog stick turning controls can make her slide in the wrong direction. At the same time, pacing glitches in the attacks lead to infuriating delays with the blade slashes.

The retarded camera work will further piss you off. The slow tracking movements mean that Kit can fall into fire traps and get burnt to a crisp before the screen finishes scrolling her into view. The camera can never be zoomed out to provide a wider shot of Kit's surroundings, and several parts in the middle of the game prevent it from being manually shifted to the sides (to provide a better view of things ahead).

Graphics: Poor

Blade Kitten is an example of how environments should never be rendered. The terrain's unclear appearances do a miserable job at indicating which surfaces can be climbed (especially the awful cases of the breakable blocks within ceilings). The frequent clutter of foreground objects is an unnecessary distraction, and one that must be fixed with the use of ugly cut-out views as the camera passes across them.

Audio: Average

The audio effects are nothing impressive. Kit's blade attacks give off a weird metallic whining noise even if she's just swiping at empty air, and the tunes sound like forgettable background filler at worst and terrible 1970s porno music at best. Although the enemies' phrases are stupid and annoyingly repetitive, Kit has decent voice acting, at least until she starts calling out endlessly whenever she is riding a creature.

Overall: Poor

Blade Kitten will bitterly disappoint many followers of the comics with its irredeemably rotten controls, boring level and enemy designs, and sloppy environmental graphics. This action platformer is supposed to be the first in a series, but with such a lousy debut, don't bet on seeing another installment any time soon.