Neko Navy (PC) review "More than a feline"

Something something horizontal scrolling cat shooter because Japan. Congratulations. You now know more backstory than Neko Navy ever lets on. Dropping you straight in the action as one of a trio of adorable cats (each with their own bullet patterns), yours is not to wonder why. I’d strongly advise against it; it’s the kind of mental arithmetic that can slowly decay your sanity. Just accept the fact that you’re a flying cat now and go shoot stuff.

The first stage takes you to the night sky of a sleepy town as you glide past darkened tower blocks and faintly glowing street lamps before you’re rudely interrupted by roving fireflies and gaggles of smiling cactus pods. They’re weird, certainly, but they mainly exist to get you acquainted to feline-powered shoot-em-ups. Blowing up enemies sees them leave behind small ghost kittens, which you can gobble up to increases both your points and the ever creeping weirdness. You can then devour bigger points by triggering the BRAVE bonus, which you score by blowing targets up at point blank range. This is easily done when you’re just killing off fireflies and cacti; it becomes a harder task when toon-esque biplanes start shooting back, and tubes of half used toothpaste complete with dead, soulless eyes and spider legs creep down the side of the screen. Don’t get weirded out yet; it’s only level one.

Neko’s big attempt at standing out (aside from all the literal insanity) is that it hyper-charges the hell out of the cat’s access to their special attacks, allowing them to be used multiple time per bite-sized stage. It means that players hunting a high score will wait for a densely populated screen, and then go all out on anything unfortunate enough to randomly exist at that time. I tend to wait for the patchwork knapsacks that clumsily remain airborne on tiny awkward wings before really letting loose. Then, once all the cannon fodder is fried, Neko decides to screw all that whimsical nonsense and drops [The Watcher In The Sky] MELTY HEART from the cloudbank, complete with dramatic slowdown and a cinematic nametag to boot. MELTY doesn’t care that you’re a cat; MELTY has end of level boss work to do.



And so you do battle against a screen-filling mechanical crab thing, because that’s just what you do now. Malicious moggies can weave between the neon pink onslaught and either plough bullets into MELTY’s shell, or destroy some of his weaponry, such as his claws, first. Being able to focus in on individual boss weapons continues throughout; it’s often a good idea to take the big guns out, if you can. It means you can milk them for even more delicious ghost kittens.

Stage Two takes part in a forest. You’d be forgiven for initially believing that it’s just going to throw the same enemies at you as the first stage, mainly because that’s exactly what it does for the first few exchanges. Then the grinning cactus pods stop being pods and start being cubes. They fall from the skies in droves, stacking where they land, forming happy little pillars of death. And then, looking like they’re just pleased to be taking part, the marshmallow cars arrive. God help us all, the marshmallow cars arrive. Then you face off against a smirking collection of flowers that spins its floral limbs in and out of focus like an organic carousel, forcing you to wait for each strand to cycle back into sync before you can attack it.

There are seven stages in all; not a one of them is even borderline normal. The third stage is in a clinic where you’re chased relentlessly by roving gangs of pills while medical mannequin torsos drop inverted from the roof to pelt you with bullets and pristine, plasticy abs. Sleepy grabber claws reach off-screen to try and assemble longcats – let them do so, and you face being blocked in by an impassable pillar of adorable doom. I don’t want to talk about stage four. It’s named Sausage Fest. It’s the stuff nightmares are made from.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (May 16, 2019) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.