Review :: Blade Kitten

It’ll be best if I get this off my chest right away. I did not finish Blade Kitten. The reason? It came close to boring me to death. It may sound a tad unprofessional, and even a bit crass for me to say that, but that’s the long and short of it. This does mean I won’t be assigning a score, It’d be in bad taste to do that. Blade Kitten is a game with a familiar concept and a cool art style, but it became a chore to play. I had to stop.

You take on the role of Kit Ballard, a bounty hunter, who has arrived on Hollow Wish capture a notorious gang leader. Once there she meets a fellow bounty hunter, Justice Kreel, who breaks a key with Kit’s mission information on it and becomes her rival and the game’s first large protagonist. The story is well told through cutcenes, all of which look great. The anime style works well and helped draw me in to the story. However, as you progress it’s clear the game relies on the charm of it’s art style too much.

Blade Kitten is a seriously flawed experience, but it’s nice to see a developer making this Metroid style of game again. The controls, on the whole, are fine. Ocassionally, I ran into a few issues when it came to Kit’s ability to scale walls and other acrobatics. It felt a little unresponsive and made this supposed element of freedom hard to deal with. The is fairly combat focused and there lies one of it’s biggest problems. There was no combo system to be found and killing the waves of idiotic AI became tedious after a while. It felt clunky and stilted. I’m not expecting something on the scale of God Of War or anything, but a bit of flow to the combat would’ve been nice.

The biggest problem I have with this game is it’s length. Well, not just how long it is, repetition plays a part too. The game is split into two acts and I barely cleared the first when I caved in. I was doing the same thing over and over and seeing no reward, there seemed to be no end goal in sight. At this point the charm of the game’s anime-style visuals had worn off, the story was nothing to write home about and I could play no more. In short: it bored me. There’s never been a game that has broken me like this. Many have come close, but this took the biscuit.

Play the trial, see what you think. I applaud Krome for trying to breathe life into a forgotten way of gaming, but it became a chore to play.

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