Laser Kitty Pow Pow review - A frantic arcade shooter best played in short bursts
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| Laser Kitty Pow Pow

Cats? Brilliant. Giant floating cat heads? Interesting, but not quite as cuddly. Giant floating cat heads that shoot lasers out of their eyes? Now we're talking.

In fact, "laser-firing cat heads" is the only language Laser Kitty Pow Pow speaks, in a twitchy, hard-as-nails arcade shooter that is as bizarre as it is cleverly executed.

It can become mindlessly repetitive all too quickly, and it doesn't bring enough fresh ideas to the table to be much more than a slight distraction for a few minutes at a time, but in short bursts it is actually pretty fun.

Mew mew, pew pew

The objective in Laser Kitty Pow Pow is to shoot bad guys with your eye lasers as they run at you from either side of the screen, before they can get close enough to take a swing at you.

Tapping one side of the screen will shoot at the closest target on the corresponding side, but also physically pushes your giant cat head to the other side of the screen and straight into harm's way.

Laser Kitty Pow Pow

To make matters more interesting, collectible coins, power-ups, and mission-critical items will appear deep in enemy territory, so you'll need to push yourself into the danger zone to make sure you can keep moving forward.

What this means is that there's a little more strategy to it than just blasting away mindlessly, as you'll need to keep your kitty as central as possible to ensure you can reach the collectibles before they vanish.

And it all adds up to a fairly enjoyable, fast-paced experience. Levels don't last very long, giving you short bursts of anarchic fun blasting away dozens of enemies.

Pet me

That is, until you start venturing into later levels, which increase the number of gems required to finish a level, while rapidly ramping up the number of enemies that show up and adding newer, harder ones to boot.

The longer the levels start to drag, the less fun the game gets – particularly when you start having to fend off enemies with huge health bars while using a crappy cat.

Laser Kitty Pow Pow

You can unlock new cats using the coins you earn, but grinding these out takes an excruciatingly long time, and which cat you unlock is entirely random, meaning you might not even get one that's any better.

And it's all very, very repetitive. Raising the number of required items doesn't really change the action at all, and instead drags it out past the point of being fun and into a grinding slog.

Cat nap

Overall, Laser Kitty Pow Pow is a relatively enjoyable slice of arcade action that tries to take things too far without offering up much variety.

Rather than throw in some twists on the formula, the game just keeps adding more of the same and acting like it's fun and challenging, when really, it's just a bit dull.

But the game does offer up a couple of minutes of fun at a time, with a surprising amount of depth and strategy for what is essentially a very simply game.

Laser Kitty Pow Pow review - A frantic arcade shooter best played in short bursts

In short bursts, Laser Kitty Pow Pow is good, mindless fun, but all too soon its levels start to drag and its repetition begins to grate
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.