clickbliss

Copy Kitty Short Review

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Copy Kitty
  
• Developer- Nuclear Strawberry
  
• Publisher- Degica
  
• PC 
  

A lot of action games suffer from a lack of feedback. Copy Kitty isn’t one of them. Its got the type of feedback you get when you stick your microphone in front of your speakers, crank the volume, and fill the room with distortion. Its colors are overwhelming and obnoxious, garish in delivery, with several competing styles and guaranteed to compete for your attention with things get chaotic. I ended up playing it more by feeling than by sight.

Its main gimmick, the ability to combine up to three powers to create new ones, plays into that chaos. Copy Kitty is very comfortable with letting you make overpowered weapons. At one point I was regularly obliterating at least half the screen with a single shot. This is counter-balanced by the selection of levels. Each level will have certain targets, but getting to them will require understanding a certain idea. You might have to power a set of gates with electric shocks, or fire at targets through walls with the wave beam to open up other areas. It’s got a real sandbox feeling, and definitely gave me some Bangai-O vibes in the way the level design seemed willing to try out every variation of mechanisms and powers.

If there’s a weak point to Copy Kitty, it’s the boss fights. They display a lot of creativity, building encounters around certain toolsets and often have a certain arc that ends in a dramatic finish. But they also bring out the most lacking parts of Copy Kitty. There’s a bit of stiffness in the movement, and I wasn’t always able to move with the preciseness that I wanted, making dodging and parrying attacks more ambiguous that I’d like. The boss stages also lack the brevity that gives the parade of ideas in the main levels so much momentum. It doesn’t necessarily drag down the game, but after a few tries on a boss I did find myself wishing I had more freeform choice over the levels so I could explore the other stages instead.

Copy Kitty is a great sandbox of ideas. The sheer overwhelming momentum of its combat and power mixing had me constantly excited to see what would come next. If you can get past the garish visuals and appreciate its lack of restraint, there’s definitely something for you here.