[Review] Aqua Kitty UDX – Nintendo Switch

Aqua Kitty DX
Nintendo Switch

Developed By : Tikipod LTD
Published By : Tikipod
Category : Action, Arcade
Release Date : Feb 15, 2018

When a worldwide crisis depletes the world of it’s milk resources, every cat and kitten across the globe goes insane. But, a new source of milk is discovered and redemption is in sight! The only problem? It’s under the sea. These feisty felines must overcome their fear of water if they wish to persevere and continue to survive.

That’s right, take to the depths and maneuver your own underwater ship. Aqua Kitty is what I call (hell maybe it’s an official term and I just never knew) a wrap-around side-scroller. What I mean by this is that each level is presented as a rectangular map. You can move constantly right or left, and you’ll never hit a wall, because once you reach the “end” you’ll just resume on the opposite side. (So if you hit the right end, you resume back on the left side and vice versa).

Your ship is capable of pushing out a normal shot and a turbo shot on it’s own. The difference with the turbo is it’s three shots stacked on top of each other. You also are able to switch which direction you’re moving with the press of any of the shoulder buttons. It’s not respective to which direction you want to face, so there’s no need to differentiate between left and right sides.

When it gets into the game, it might be fair to also label this one as a bit of a tower defense game, since that’s all you really end up doing. At the bottom of the water there will be a couple of milk miners, and you are in charge of protecting them from the countless mechanical enemies that will go by. They come in a few different variations as well. Some can fire at you, ranging from single-round shots with a slow rate of fire, to enemies that can fire in a burst pattern. Other ships are there only to try and capture your miners. Once they do, they’ll drift up towards the surface and once they’re out of water, unless you have a power-up that enables you to shoot upwards, you can kiss them goodbye. Sorry, only one life here for these kitty miners. (Probably lost the other eight overcoming the whole water thing…)

Occasionally, some enemies will drop powerups in the level. These can give you additional shooting capabilities like shooting backwards (in addition to forwards), a scatter shot that goes at an angle up/down in the direction you’re facing, a vertical shot. They can also drop some other helpful powerups like giving you a couple co-fighters that fight alongside you, health pickups (you start with three hearts, each time you’re hit you lose one, and you can hold up to five total at a time), and my favorite a “nuke” which sends out a crapton (official measurement term) of explosive missiles in a big circle.

The HUD can be pretty useful too. Not only does it provide with your own health stats and a radar display of the current level (complete with colored blips marking your enemies). It also tells you what wave you you’re currently on out of the total for the level, and how many enemies remain in the current wave. So you can always see how healthy you are, where everyone generally is in the level, and how far through the level you’ve made it.

Aqua Kitty also offers a mode called Dreadnought, which brings you down to the “Meowiana Trench” where you’ll still be protecting kitties from lots of mechanicals over multiple screens this time. The gameplay is really a lot of fun and smooth, as well as easy to fall into. It might not be the most enticing of stories, but for a cast of furry felines, it fits perfectly. Tikipod has made a great addition to the shmup genre with Aqua Kitty, definitely grab your copy from eShop as soon as you can.

Playability
Handheld – Great
Detached Joy-Cons – Great
Joy-Con Controller – Great
Pro Controller – N/A
Docked – Great