ASTRO AQUA KITTY

Very good scrolling shooter. Nice ship development. I'm not very into cat-world, but despite this great retro-shooter.

It's not at all bad, the art style and intersting levels are amazing but doesn't make me want to play it again on expert difficulty. (Hint: play on "laid back"/easiest so enemies don't take forever to destroy in level 3 or later) [h2] What is the character of the game? [/h2] I would describe it as a "tactical" shmup, like descent (the game from 1995), it takes consideration and patience to play, you can't just go in and light everything up, that doesn't work. An that's because of the "bad" weapons and the sheer volume of enemies you encounter. Each of the weapons you can have is "bad" in it's own unique way and there is no upgrade system or "build" to patch the shortcomings of the weapons. BUT, you can also counter or straight out ignore enemy strengths with certain weapons. So you better carry a variety of guns around, for different targets. Weapons can be bad in various ways: [list] [*] first off: enemies can be all 360° in front of you but you can only shoot forwards and backwards. So all straight-forward shooting weapons are inherently bad. [*] For example there is a laser which does huge damage, BUT it can fire only 2 seconds an then you need 2 minutes to rechage the energy spent, so it has a very bad energy to damage ratio. [*] Then there is the basic gun which shoots rapidly straight forward quite far, requires no energy and does very good DPS, but it is useless against armored targets which reduce the damage of each shot. [*] Another: A mine layer, which is very useless EXCEPT on some very specific bosses. [*] Another: A shot gun but it has such short range and such a low fire rate its basically useless even against enemy swarms, BUT if you can make all bullets hit the same target it does great damage. [*] Another: The helix weapon which has the highest range, highest volley damage, almost no ammo consumption BUT you can't propery aim with it and actually hit anything which isn't static or impossible to miss and it only works on specific angles. [*] Another: A high AOE rapid fire close range explosive blaster, BUT it consumes so much energy you can't keep shooting with it for very long. [*] The best weapons I could find was the sonic gun, which hits through multiple enemies but has low damage; the plasma rifle which has aim assist and does high damage against single targets, but has a slow rate of fire and the missile launcher which is the best weapon in the game IMO because it has 360° auto aim, high damage, AOE but has limited ammo. I equipped the missile launcher all game as secondary weapon. [/list] So there are two ways to play through the level areas - dart in and out to meticulously destroy one enemy after the other with the correct weapon, "pull tactics" and avoid getting hit until you can go in and mop up the rest. Or just rush past the enemies ignoring them an go straight to the objective in a Hail Mary play. Especially on the bosses some weapons can make the difference between extreme hardcore mode and "easy" progress. You can make your life much easier by using the right weapon on the boss. [h2] Good [/h2] I really like the art style, and the levels are interesting - in each one new enemies are added, the variety is good. The bosses are pretty cool and there are some easy puzzles to solve now and again, which are fun. The humor is also great. There are a lot different weapons to find, even though all of them are "bad" as explained. The active abilities you can unlock are very powerful, especially considering you can save-point-scum with them. [h2] Bad [/h2] The RPG element of this game doesn't really work, the only thing important is the weapon level and it's also no looter-shooter because there are too few items dropped by the enemies and your inventory is too small, so just take whatever you can get. You are lucky if you find the weapon you want, once, each level. The game would have been better without leveled weapons. Because of the leveling, each level is tedious until you find better weapons. I often resorted to save-point-scumming, to quickly recharge ammo and abilities to make progress without waiting around forever for my weapons to recharge. Also, in each new area you start out "weak" again. Later I rushed through the levels, not bothering to destroy enemies, which worked quite well but feels out of charackter for a shmup. The only missions you'll get throughout the game are fetch quests. Get X amount of Y and return here. Or get Key-Card-Cat C and return back here. No select wheel for the weapons. The invetory is fairly quick to use, however. A poor man's select wheel. Something I also found annoying was that I had to "pre-dodge" bullets because the enemies aim ahead of you, not at you. So the best way of avoiding bullets is to fake moving in a direction, wait for the enemy salvo to release, then change the direction, avoiding the bullets. Especially in boss fights this is important to master. The save points before bosses are sometimes reasonably far away, so while getting destroyed by bosses you will spend some annoying amount of time getting back there to get destroyed again. [h2] Verdict [/h2] Barely a yes, buy it, because the bosses are quite cool and once you figure out you need to hold on onto a variety of weapons to cheese the bosses it's actually quite fun to figure out how to do it. Yeah the levels and leveling -- you just have to do them/rush them to get to the bosses. Also the art style is just great.