Poof vs. the Cursed Kitty, an interesting title for an interesting game. Listed on steam as action, indie, and strategy, Poof vs. the Cursed Kitty meets these and more, playing primarily as an action, platformer with strategy and elements of tower defence. You play as Poof the heroic dog, bounding about the arena defeating waves of enemies while defending his golden egg laying Kitty.
With only one game mode, one map, and one objective the first look at Poof might seem bleak, but once you start playing it’s a game you will find hard to put down. With a variety of enemyies, sub missions , cosmetic and sound unlocks for the map and characters, it can be hard to stop playing when you can see that just one more try could unlock new things, constantly giving you something to strive towards.
The game has but one main objective, protect your golden egg laying kitty from waves of greedy monsters. You accomplish this by using a variety of attacks from jumping on enemy’s heads, throwing knives, bringing down an ice age to freeze the map, or setting up traps and turrets. Sounds easy right? Not at all, Poof vs. the Cursed Kitty is a hard game, one that’s fun and intuitive but challenging, with a great level design and bucket loads of enemies that grow stronger as you keep playing, and a kitty that dies in one hit, it become quite hard to keep an eye on everything on screen at once which leads to fast and frantic game play.
Each time you enter the game to try to defend your kitty you gain XP whether you complete a sub-mission, get 20000 points or just die early on. XP is accumulated until you level up where by you unlock new random rewards, skins for Poof and Kitty as well as backgrounds for the map and even more music to be played randomly during the game, while each time you level up you’re told that you have unlocked one of these things, you’re not told what you have unlocked, this along with the way the game randomly uses the rewards to break up an monogamy can mean that it could be several games before you see you’re new unlock, this can be frustrating but does help to make each game that little bit different.
The main premise for each level is to complete your 3 sub missions; every time you complete 3 sub missions you gain one point to unlock power ups and new moves. The progression system is quite linier as you are given a choice of between 1-3 unlocks and you must unlock all of the options given to you before you are given more so most of the time it doesn’t really matter what order you unlock them in although it is a nice feature that you can pick the order. These missions can range from something simple like ‘perform 15 Sky attacks’ (a basic move) to something as hard as ‘get a 30x combo’ or complicated ‘Kill 15 enemies with arrows’, the simple ones can be completed in one or two tries but some can be a real challenge as they need to completed in one game and do not carry over.
Poof vs. the Cursed Kitty has an amazing sound track, the music fits the game style perfectly and despite the fact that you will be listening to a lot of the music again and again while you retry levels it never becomes intrusive or feel repetitive, this I feel is down to the music choices and the random effect of the unlocked music changing every time you restart.
Poof vs. the Cursed Kitty does suffer from a steep difficulty curve though, most people will probably find the first few missions easy but after the first 7-8 you are suddenly given some really tough missions that could mean you have to survive for double the length of time you have been before or use a mechanic you haven’t yet used to kill a large amount of enemies, this can cause a lot of frustration if you try to focus on your missions too much.
Poof vs. the Cursed Kitty runs very well on most systems with only simple yet well designed graphics, this gives the game a cartoony feel without any taxing problems on even integrated graphics on a 5 year old laptop. Although I have run across several bugs most were only small thing that didn’t really affect the game in any way.
In conclusion Poof vs. the Cursed Kitty is a game that can be picked up cheap and provide several hours of fun and challenging gameplay. It is a game that can be played in short bursts only completing a few missions at a time or a game that you could play for several hours constantly trying to get a better and better score.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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