Copy Kitty

Damn Japanese, making insane games again. I don't actually know the nationality of the indie developers of this game, and it doesn't really matter, but Copy Kitty has so many things happening at the same time it can be very difficult to comprehend, especially with the crazy visual style. It definitely stands out the moment you look at it, but the strangely coherent mess of an artstyle may correctly invoke both the feelings of this being a game by amateurish developers as well as it being something quite unique.

Copy Kitty is a stage-based action platformer with the unique gimmick that you can combine 2-3 different weapons into a new, more powerful weapon. This creates a rather insane number of combinations I'm surprised the developers bothered to implement. This combining is dynamic and ammo-based, so if one weapon runs out of ammo, your weapon downgrades until you pick up some more ammo from slain enemies.
You start the level with a single weapon or none at all, making the start of each stage much more slow and calculated. However, once you gather 3 weapons, destroying enemies ususally becomes a breeze and you just zoom through the level. While I dislike this trivialization, the alternative might be worse. With a lot of enemies on screen, you firing your particle-heavy weapons, and everything being so gosh-darn colorful, it can be nigh impossible to tell what's going on. The enemy placement and level design also doesn't tend to be that well thought through in my opinion, so being able to ingore them to a large degree actually comes out as a positive.
There is also a lot of detail put into less important things, like enemy descriptions, statistics tracking, dialogue, and probably many things I missed. The game truly feels like it has been made with a lot of passion.

Still, I failed to find satisfaction from this game. The combat and levels aren't designed well enough to interest me when I am not powerful, and once I do become powerful, most strategy and reason is thrown out the window, and the game becomes boring because it is mindless. I believe there is emphasis on playing the levels again later to obtain a better score through methods which aren't necessarily aligned with beating the levels in the most optimal way. (Some sort of style bonuses I think. I did not explore this side of the game.) Knowing me, I of course find repeating things under the same conditions boring, so this did not appeal to me at all.

Overall, I can't give it a personal recommendation, as I don't find the game to be up to my quality standards. Still, it might be interesting to fans of score attack action platformers, or for anyone looking to just experience this very unique weapon gimmick I have not seen anywhere else.