You may not have heard about it, but PETA has released a game for the Switch and a free one at that. A game about a little kitten (and a few other animals, once you unlock them) wielding tons of guns in order to destroy as many robots as possible. You don’t see a premise like Kitten Squad‘s every day.

Now, let me be clear: I’m here to review a game. I’m not here to discuss about what PETA does and whether or not that is right or wrong. They do their own thing and I do my own thing. With that out of the way, let’s talk about Kitten Squad: it’s not a good game. Oh it’s not good at all, but it’s also not exactly awful. The best way I can describe it is that it is just yet another game out there. It’s bland, boring, forgettable, with passable gameplay and really bad visuals.

As you can notice by the pictures, Kitten Squad is far from being a looker. Its visuals are comprised of very amateurish Photoshop drawings, regardless of whether it’s during the actual game or during its horrendous cutscenes, when the game tries to teach you a thing or two about how bad SeaWorld is before resuming your carnage-filled rampage against robots and other unidentifiable evil beings. Depending on which weapon you use, the amount of shots and explosions onscreen will be so high you won’t even be able to know where on Earth your furry friend is onscreen. The game also features very poor sound design, mostly comprised of repetitive musical loops and insanely loud and insanely frequent sound effects.

Gameplay-wise, however, Kitten Squad isn’t exactly bad. It surely isn’t engaging, but it gets the job done. It’s a twin-stick shooter and it gets the job done in this department. You move around with one stick and shoot with the other. It’s somewhat responsive but also very simplistic, to the point you only use the two sticks during gameplay. You can’t even change weapons once you’ve collected them. You can already imagine that the game gets repetitive pretty quickly and you’re not wrong; the game tries to give you a bit of insight and a backstory before each new “mission”, but everything can be summarized in shooting every single ugly baddie in sight until you find a mistreated animal you need to save. Get some coins after doing so, buy a new hat, rinse and repeat.

If it wasn’t for the fact that PETA was endorsing this game, I doubt anyone would have given Kitten Squad any attention whatsoever. It’s not an offensively bad game, it’s just an incredibly generic twin-stick shooter that looks horrible and plays decently. You can have about 10 to 15 minutes of fun with it, and since it’s a free game, it’s not like you’re going to feel ripped off or anything like that.

Oh, weirdly enough, it also has microtransactions. Because you can’t write PETA without an E and an A…

 

 

Graphics: 2.5 The character designs look like the most amateurish Photoshop drawings you’ll ever see. The visuals are cheap and confusing.	Gameplay: 6.5 A very simple and uninspiring twin-stick shooter control scheme. Some important elements, like being able to swap between weapons, are missing altogether.
Sound: 4.0 A repetitive soundtrack you can barely pay attention to since the sound effects are loud and constant.	Fun Factor: 5.0 It’s far from good, but far from being awful. It’s just a functional shooter with some chaotic level design (or lack thereof) and some random facts about captive animals.
Final Verdict: 4.5

Reviewed on Switch.
Also available on: PS4