Aqua Kitty-Milk Mine Defender DX: Let's not get physical

It's time to expose another dirty little secret, dear fellow gamers: I'm extremely fond of Shoot'em ups. Despite the fact that I didn't even play enough of these games throughout my gaming career to count them on the fingers of one hand, every single one I've played enthralled me and pretty much remained engraved in my memory for all eternity. So when I found Aqua Kitty on a PSN sale a couple of months ago, I simply had to purchase it. Because it's a Shoot'em up, and because cats. And I've been playing it lately not because I needed a fix of frantic shooting or cute felines, but rather because Limited Run Games are about to release a physical version of the game and I wanted to assess if it was worth the purchase.

I had good hopes for that game, mind you. Not only is the premise of having kittens foraging for milk unbearably cute, but Aqua Kitty emulates one of my favourite and seldom-used shooting subgenres, i.e. horizontal aquatic shooting. I still have exhilarating memories of wreaking havoc on the marine fauna in level 2-3 in Super Mario Land on the Game Boy, and I fully expected to feel the same kind of giddy delight again in Aqua Kitty's cut-throat waters. I had also heard that the soundtrack was absolutely glorious, pure chiptune ear-candy; and I was more than ready to blast every swimming creature in sight while gorging on 8-bit aural goodness until my head swam.

However, my actual gameplay experience with Aqua Kitty was nowhere near as frantic and elating as I had fantasized. My trip through the game's hazardous waters was a bit of a trudge, and this was solely due to questionable game design. Take the level design, for instance: instead of featuring an automatic scrolling, zones loop and can be navigated indifferently from left to right or right to left. While this gives the player a bit of leeway by letting them choosing their direction and speed, it also removes the stimulating feeling of urgency generated by an automatic scrolling. I found myself looping through the zones and meeting the same waves of pesky enemies over and over again until I got sick of them. And talking about enemies, they are the meat and potatoes of the game, since you can only exit a zone once you've been scouring it of all the resident pest. No rushing towards the end of the stage and dodging half of the aerial obstructions in heroic dashes in Aqua Kitty: you're basically a marine janitor, and you won't go anywhere until you've cleared all the trash floating around. I don't know about you, but I find that gameplay premise a tad anticlimactic.

Aqua Kitty also suffers from the "Seen Level One, Seen Them All" syndrome. The entirety of the gameplay is concentrated in the first set of levels: you get your two types of ammunition from the get-go (weak unlimited ammo and strong limited ammo) as well as a briefing regarding gameplay objectives; then you polish off a couple of levels, fight a boss, and that's it. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the game, only with more waves of pesky enemies as the game goes on. Sure, these new foes boast fresh moving and shooting patterns; but at its core, the gameplay remains desperately unaltered. When you've played the first set of levels, you're pretty much  played them all; the rest is just flourish and extra enemies by the truckload. It doesn't help that said first set of levels is graced with what I deem the best track of the whole game (i.e. the wonderfully giddy and bouncy "Buttermilk Bay"), making these opening levels feel like a monument of perfection that the game never manages to top in its latter stages.

And since I mentioned the music, does it deserve its stellar reputation? Oh yes, it does. It's highly reminiscent of the Ecco the Dolphin soundtrack, and it's bound to elicit tidal waves of nostalgia just by sheer virtue of its lush chiptunes that sound like a love affair between a Game Gear/Master System soundchip and a Megadrive one. It's not the game's only highlight, mind you: the controls are as tight, sharp and responsive as they can possibly be, without a shred of lag or delayed response to be found. And it would take a heart of stone not to melt when hearing the adorable "mreow" sound uttered by the feline miners when you rescue them from abducting jellyfishes.

This leads us back to the original question: is Aqua Kitty worth a physical purchase, with shipping and toll fees involved? To put it simply, no. Sure, it has one of the most adorable premises ever created since the dawn of gaming and the best OST of the last two decades; but take away these two elements and Aqua Kitty loses fifty percent of its appeal. The gameplay is too shallow to offer any replay value beyond the challenge of clearing the game in the insanely hard Normal and Arcade modes, which I certainly won't do. Although this little aquatic feline odyssey was definitely fun to play, I can't really imagine myself picking up that game ever again now that I've cleared it. And so will Aqua Kitty forever remain a digital entry in my precious collection. On the other hand, I've purchased the OST, because it's freakin' awesome and it's stuck so deeply in my head that I simply had no other choice. Heck, I'm even listening to it as I'm wrapping up this post. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!