A game with a title like LaserKittyPowPow is almost impossible to pass up when you see it on the iTunes App Store. In this game, you start out playing the titular Kitty Pow Pow, a cherubic white cat who whirls through the cosmos on a cloud before landing on battle ground; in each level, your goal is to use your laser eyes and other weapons to obliterate enemies coming at you from either side and to achieve a certain amount of what appear to be gold geodes in order to advance to the next level. During your adorable sci-fi mass annihilation, you earn coins, which you can use to upgrade your weapons or (most excitingly) to buy different cats to play as, which appear to you in a sort of blind-box way, randomly attaining common, rare, or super rare cats.
I do have to say that this game seems geared toward a particular taste, and that the short-attention-span gameplay of LaserKittyPowPow failed to hook me at the onset. One gets a sense of randomness and chaos playing this game, which is either exciting or annoying depending on your personal tastes. Expect graphics that are a combination of old-school Japanese fighting games and current pop-culture fads, katanas and unicorns living together in an odd harmony. The player gets a sense of disorientation, and one does not so much play the game’s quest as they are dragged along for it. Bonus levels, coin sprees, and secret portals appear out of the blue. For what it’s worth, the game is very low on ads. You can watch a 30-second ad to revive or to get a coin bonus, but they never interrupt the gameplay.
At first I wasn’t sold on the game’s sugar high, fast-paced gameplay, but once I got used to the tempo of LaserKittyPowPow, I grew to appreciate its little surprises and delights. I may not keep it installed for eternity, but I’ll certainly give it a few more tries.