Can you make Flick the cat employee of the month by flicking him around to world to collect new hats? One thing’s for sure about Flickitty, it’s unique.
Flickitty is a platformer in just about the broadest sense of the word, there are no on-screen controls and you don’t jump between platforms as much as get knocked through the sky. To move around the world you touch down anywhere on the screen and drag to move Flick’s head away from his body and then release to send him flying in that direction. It’s an odd mechanic for moving around, but it’s one that you’ll instantly learn and become comfortable with and it’s oddly one of the better touch screen only control methods that I’ve come across.
You’ll be using your power of kitty flicking to navigate around five mazes and complete tasks involving finding, retrieving or destroying items in the world. There’s no death in Flickitty, however there are hazards around the world that will burn you, freeze you, zap you, poison you and more. These hazards penalize your score for the task at hand and can require you to have to collect an additional item to complete your goal. The idea of these tasks sounds fine and they’re often accompanied by some offbeat, witty written dialog, but they quickly become tiresome, as if Flickkitty was created as some kind of tech demo and the world was quickly populated with small tasks to make use of it. There’s no real story to progress through, no sharing of your scores and times for each level, just moving around some simple maps finding items.
Completing tasks earns you a new hat which can effect Flick in some way, one appears to make him heavier and one zooms out the world making things easier to see, although in the 20+ hats available I found it hard to tell if they were having any effect on the gameplay at all, perhaps they weren’t. One thing the hats do is add to the visuals inside the game which are very well drawn. Flick has a large expressive face and animates well when hit by hazards. Likewise the music has a real offbeat vibe to it that’s unique to each world, sadly though the roughly five minutes of music is likely to repeat a little too often for most to bare.
It’ll take roughly an hour to complete all the tasks in Flickkitty and much longer if you plan to perfectly complete each one by not falling prey to the hazards. The gameplay doesn’t hold up for very long and it does become frustrating on later levels, but for a single dollar Flickitty is something a little bit different, with some real character and that’s not something that’s seen too often.
[rating:3]
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