After wooing us with the wonderfully named Floating Cloud
God Saves the Pilgrims and The 2D Adventures of Rotating Octopus Character the mad
cap humour of Dakko Dakko studios returns with the Wii U exclusive and equally
epically named Scram Kitty and his Buddy on Rails.
The plot is mad and sends us back to the 16-bit days of
lunatic ideas. Basically, your cat sends you a message from the international
space station saying super intelligent mice have taken over and you need to get
up there and rescue all the cats and take it back from them. What this amounts
to is jumping on your spinner and blasting, leaping and spinning your way
around some top down puzzle/platform levels.
The puzzle elements are based around shooting switches,
finding different weapons to destroy obstacles and simply working out how to
make jumps to different rails. It’s nothing massively complex but when combined
with the past paced gameplay and onslaught of enemies it’s more than enough to
deal with.
The game draws a lot of influence from Rotating Octopus but
there are a ton of new ideas going on here. Working out the movement is key to success
and your character controls in a fairly unique way. Your spinner is magnetic
and attaches to any rail. You can move along the rails under your own steam but
the only way you can reach another rail is to jump to it. What this means is
that you need to use the rails carefully to get the right angles to jump and
fire.
You will be attacked by various types of mice on your
adventure and making sure you can actually hit them with your variety of
weapons forms part of the crux of the game. Your character only fires directly in
front of themselves so if you are on a side rail and they are coming at you
from below you need to jump to a rail facing towards them in order to hit the
pesky vermin. It starts out tricky but you soon get the hang of how it all works
and it adds to the puzzle elements of certain levels.
The goal of each level is to rescue four cats and reach the
exit door. You can just find the exit if you want but you’ll need cats to
unlock levels as you go so replaying earlier stages is vital to progression. The
four cats each have their own characteristics to be found. The lazy cat just sits
by the exit and the lucky cat requires all the lucky pennies to be found in a
level before appearing. The black cat requires a super tough mouse to be destroyed
before it will come out and finally the scaredy cat, when picked up, will run
off to somewhere else on the station and requires chasing around and capturing
in a strict time limit.
Scram Kitty is a tough game and you’ll need both patience
and perseverance to get through. You have an energy bar but once it’s gone you’ll
have to start the level again from scratch. This includes finding cats, coins
and weapons again or taking down the big bad mouse commanders. The levels are
fairly compact but the amount of skill required from the player means dying
near the end of a stage can be exasperating.
There is one problem with Scram Kitty which can be a pain.
Every now and then the proverbial Scram will appear on screen to give advice.
When this happens he pretty much takes up the entire screen and this led to a
number of deaths and missed jumps as we simply couldn’t see what was going on.
You can move the advice to the game pad but then you miss what he is telling
you as by the time you hear the voice and look down he’s already said what he
was going to. It’s a minor issues but one that does become annoying at times.
Overall, Scram Kitty is one of the better Wii U exclusive
games. There’s a lot of invention and originality on show in terms of the games
mechanics and we certainly haven’t played anything like this for years. It’s a
pretty essential purchase for anyone who wants an old school challenge mixed
with some clever design. Dakko Dakko seems to go from strength to strength and
they are producing games that stand out in a very crowded market. We can’t wait
to see what they come up with next.
Overall 8/10
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