Katana Kata review

So how does Katana Kata plays? The best way to describe it is as a Dark Souls-lite game. The game’s focus is combat and how well your reflexes work as it breaths and dies on parry, blocking and your timing in your attacks. The nameless protagonist has two attacks; upward and downward attacks. If an enemy attacks with an upward attack, doing a downward one will parry their attack.

If your skill parrying skills are iffy, you can also block enemy attacks giving you an opening to attack. Although if you block too much your weapon will break leaving you vulnerable. While you can stick attack with your bare hands, you can’t block. Thankfully, if you lose your weapon, dead enemies will drop their own leaving you the opportunity to pick them up.

In between combat, if you have picked up a whetstone, you can maintain your weapon in order to make it last longer, but given that 98% of enemies drop their weapon, you’re sure to find something else to defend yourself. You can also pick up water bottles in order to regain your health as enemies can be brutal and it’s easy to die within a few hits.

In order to help players survive, levelling up rewards players with XP points that can be used to increase their health, breath (stamina for actions), strength and dexterity. While this is useful, it doesn’t help as much as you’d think; I first focused on increasing my health, but no matter how long was my health bar, I’d still die with a few hits. And trust me, you’ll die often.

Every time you die, you have the choice to return to the dojo or fight for your survival in a nightmare. The battle within the nightmare is the worst of the bunch; no matter your level, the battle is harder than any other encounter and will require you to master parrying as he can break your weapon rather quickly and there are no replacements around. If you die then, you’ll be thrown back to the dojo and have to restart the current level from start; yes enemies will respawn.

The biggest problem and nuisance with Katana Kata are the controls. The developers made some questionable decisions when mapping the actions to the controller’s buttons. For whatever reason, they mapped the attacks to RB and RT; while X and A serves as dodging (why 2 dodge buttons?!) and unfortunately, this cannot be remapped.

Katana Kata does look great, however. The game features a unique paper-like visual; levels are overall well-designed. Although, sometimes it can be hard to see enemies through the foliage, especially in the first level, the bathhouse. Also, for whatever reason, when transitioning from an area to another, the environment look like the game was affected when Thanos snapped his fingers in Avengers: Infinity War. The soundtrack is very minimalistic; there’s an obvious Japanese inspiration and the sound of combat of weapons clanking will often overshadow the minimal soundtrack.

If you’re a Souls/Borne aficionado and looking for something short to bite on, Katana Kata will fill that void. It’s shorter and simpler than Hidetaka Miyazaki’s beloved, niche series and will allow you to play something different yet familiar. If you’ve never played any game from the Souls/Borne genre, Katana Kata can act an entry point in the genre, however, be warned that you’ll have to replay the same levels/sections over and over with zero sense of progression.