How about one more to finish out the night? Might as well finally let my PS3 get in on the action:
Blade Kitten is a 2.5D action platformer published by Atari in 2010, and it's apparently based on a webcomic series I've never heard of starring an anime catgirl bounty hunter.
I'll give Blade Kitten some props at the start for its visual style, which has aged extremely gracefully in the last 16 years, even if Kate Ballard (the catgirl) looks like she's going to try to sell me some Esurance every time the game goes into a cutscene. The environments may be drab and uninteresting, but those character models wouldn't look too out of place in a modern Indie game. The game is also fairly competently voice acted (not a guarantee in 2010), and there's a pretty strong emphasis on exploration with all the hidden collectables and the platforming tricks you need to reach them.
That said, this is an action platformer, and the combat was awful even by the standards of the time. Kate has a sword that follows her around in the air at all times, and you can mash a button to spam swings in front of you. There's also a grab with the sword the game really forces you to use in the 2nd half to remove enemy shields. That's about it for the combat, which wouldn't be too big an issue if the game didn't have quite so MUCH of it, and if the collision detection in this game weren't fundamentally broken. Sure, you CAN pounce on enemies at times to throw them in the air and you CAN also slide into enemies, but the timing on the aerial grab is really finicky and the slide doesn't play well with the Dualshock 3's analog stick. In the end, it's just more efficient to spam the attack button, the BORING way. And meanwhile, enemies just swarm all around you, beating you to death. Even with regenerating health, Kate is extremely fragile and it makes the levels way more frustrating than they need to be.
Things don't get that much better with the platforming. Being a catgirl, Kate can climb walls and ceilings, as well as lock jumps onto certain small platforms, and that's basically how every secret in the game will be hidden. What's frustrating about the platforming is that there IS more to it but the game never forces you to use the full depths of your kit during the main progression of the levels. For instance, Kate can plunge her sword into walls she can't climb and then use her sword as a springboard to fling herself up higher. The game NEVER tells the player they can do this in normal play. I only discovered this was a "thing" when I was rummaging through the menus and found the in-game manual that detailed how to perform this move, and I can definitely think of some early game chests I couldn't figure out how to reach that I needed that move to get to.
Unfortunately, there's a much bigger issue with the platforming that that: it's extremely unresponsive. Kate moves more like a Sonic or Bubsy than a Mario, feeling more like she's skating along the ground rather than running. This makes every level feel like an Ice level, where you're slow to get moving; suddenly start running extremely quickly; and then skid to a stop several feet from where you intended. The game's poor performance certainly doesn't help things there, either, especially in the game's 2nd half where the enemy count starts tripling and they ALL start chasing you through the levels without stopping. It also doesn't help that this game's environmental collision is a joke, and several times resulted in game-important characters getting pushed through geometry into areas they're not supposed to be in and which you can't get them out of.
And Christ, the levels drag on forever. "4-5 hours" my ass, "How Long to Beat." This one took me probably closer to 8-10, 2 full nights.
The story is also a mess. It starts simple enough: Kate comes to a planet to hunt a bounty and a fellow bounty hunter steals essentially her ID. Kate chases after her and shenanigans ensue. Unfortunately, after the opening level I completely lost track of what was going on in the story because everything kept diving into tangents and sudden inconveniences. I'm glad the game took a moment to remind players that the final boss was the bounty Kate came to hunt, because the entire "bounty hunting" story hadn't been brought up since literally the beginning of the game and I had no idea why I was suddenly at odds with this one woman.
So, why did I pick up this game? I actually do remember this one. For a while, I worked in QA for EA, where I primarily tested on 360 at first. Back then, Microsoft allowed developers on its platform into a little backstage XBLA for uploading test builds of games, and EA realized too late that that meant that anyone from any company could download builds of anyone else's game.
I played so much Space Invaders Extreme that way.
In any case, one of the other games I kept seeing on there was this Blade Kitten game. At the time, it was good-looking, and I'm a fan of both anime and platformers so it looked like a fun time. Figured I'd give it a play once I had one of those shiny new 360 and PS3 machines for myself.
Well, I'm glad that I finally played through it in any case, even if the game was at best mediocre. It reminds me of those Sonic Boom games on the 3DS at times, a Bubsy game at others. Funnily enough, you may have noticed the "Episode 1" tag in one of those screenshots. Well, this isn't another Elea situation. There actually WAS an Episode 2...on PC. Apparently, the rights to the game were in limbo for a few years when Atari went under for a while, but the original devs managed to get the rights back and put out their 2nd episode...which looks identical to the 1st game despite being made 5 years later.
Yeah, I'll pass on playing Episode 2 on PC, thanks.
Topic: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog (Read 198106 times)
