Kitty the Kitten Review

Electronic pets are a perplexing subject. Sony may have wowed businessmen back in 1999 with its AIBO, a strange robotic dog, but the rest of us were more in awe at the thing's spectacular price tag. Since then, electronic pets have bounded more and more into the mainstream, from Tamagotchis right up to the swathe of recently released pet simulators on mobile.

Not only is this infatuation deeply troubling from a psychological perspective, if you think about it, it's surely also seemingly a guarantee of gaming tosh. Feed it, walk it, pet it, ad infinitum. Anyone who's played the genre's better incarnations will be able to tell you that the hurdle can indeed be crossed, but the recipe for disaster is still right there in the devil's cookbook.

Kitty the Kitten tries to take a different route towards gaming nirvana. It has all the usual mini-games associated with keeping your pet fit, happy and fed, but in doing these you're also training your animal up for a platform game dubbed 'Platform Playtime', which could be a whole game in itself, if an uninspiring one.

This challenge sees you collecting items like milk bottles and balls of wool, while avoiding seemingly random unsavoury opponents such as worms, birds and gnomes. In practice, it's bog standard old skool ladders and platforms run-and-jump exercise, and a little too unforgiving.

Other than that, Kitty the Kitten features four mini-games designed to represent feeding, playing with, exercising and disciplining your cat. They are the usual sort of fare, suitably themed.

In the feeding game, you have to blast away mice who've stolen the catfood as though you're in a shooting gallery. The play game sees you bouncing the cat off a skateboard into the air, only finishing when you miss and your beloved feline ends up stuck head-first in the ground. In the exercise mini-game you direct a cat over hurdles and through pipes using the '2' and '8' keys. It may sound simple, but the cat keeps on getting faster, unless you bash into an obstacle. The final, slightly sadistic discipline game sees you lobbing balls, trying to knock cats off a washing line as they run from one side to the other.

The games are fun, but understandably slight. However, Kitty the Kitten keeps you playing them by adding a factor that we're all suckers for, even more so than animals: money.

You see, aside from the platform game and the mini-games, there's also a shop. In this you can buy food to keep your cat happy if you can't be bothered to play the feed mini-game and, more interestingly, you can buy upgrades to increase your performance in the mini-games. You can buy larger skateboards for the 'play' game and faster sneakers for the 'exercise' challenge, for example.

The better your performance in the mini-games, the more money you earn from playing them, so the game fosters a pleasingly moreish vicious circle of greed.

On paper, there's lots to purr over here – plenty of content and gameplay variety, as well as some addictive kitty treats. It's a pity, then, that Kitty the Kitten feels rather cheap.

It's not even that the graphics are awful (in most places they're perfectly fine). The blast-a-mouse mini-game features a nicely detailed pre-rendered background, for instance, and the visuals in general are colourful.

Rather, the game feels like it was cobbled together out of odds and ends from the bargain bin. The controls are generally a little off and the Platform Playtime section is distinctly half-hearted. Slick, this title is not, and while the game is certainly cheerful, it's the cheapness that wins out in the end.

If you don't mind your mobile games coming complete with the dubious odour of a Poundstore, Kitty the Kitten has some things going for it. Sure, it's only a pet simulator on the shallowest of levels, but the mini-games do keep you returning to try to outdo your best score. For more aesthetically-minded gamers, though, the title is likely to leave an acrid tang in the mouth, not unlike the one left, we imagine, after coughing up a furball.