Kitty Powers' Matchmaker

It’s difficult finding your soul mate nowadays and falling in love seems to be big business for some people. According to Kitty Powers everyone should be paired up with the perfect partner and it’s her job to make it happen. At her fabulous dating agency, it’s up to you and her to make cupid’s arrow land on some lonely hearts.

Taking the role of a new manager at Kitty Power's dating agency, it's up to you to find true love for various clients from all types of backgrounds. Over the course of the game, players will expand the agency; obtain higher quality of clients and a renowned fame within the community. Depending on how successful you are with matching couples together, you’ll receive big bonuses (saucy! that's Kitty's sense of humour rubbing off on me), big money and that warm feeling inside when you match up the perfect couple.

Kitty Power's Matchmaker is kept simple, light hearted and very sweet. Gameplay revolves around finding clients at different venues in towns and matching them with potential partners. You can advertise the business in several locations such as the comic book store, disco, alterative nightclub and a few others. Each location has its own collective of singles with distinct personalities and character traits. Each person has their likes such as eye colour and hair colour while certain factors play a big part in matching people like their star sign.

It’s up to the player to pair up the client with a possible match then set them on a romantic date at a fancy restaurant. The most important job and the core gameplay event in Kitty Power’s Matchmaker is to ensure everything goes smoothly during the date through different tasks. These include choosing the most engaging conversation topics, picking out the right dishes and to decide how much to tip the waiter. There are some other, more interesting optional tasks where you can decide if the client is honest about a certain thing such as their job. You can lie in order to impress their date, hoping they won’t find out or tell the truth. These little interactions will affect the relationship’s outcome raising the risk and reward aspect highly.

The date plays out with a host of quirky and amusing mini games that’ll keep you engaged throughout. If you're having trouble with a certain mini game, then you can simply pay a few coins and cheat your way through. Although funds are limited and cheating is very expensive. These mini games mostly revolve around a form of memory test which is fine the first few dates but there’s very few other types of mini games to break up the repetitive nature. If the date is a success then the player will earn rewards from a promotion, extra funds and a lovely letters stating if the couple got hitched or decided to be friends.

While the game itself is charming and easy to pick up, there are very few strong elements that’ll keep you invested for longer sessions of play. By the time you start the tougher dates the player would’ve completed the same series of mini games dozens of times with only a handful remaining enjoyable towards the harder stages. Also every date takes place at restaurants and while the theme changes; you tend to get a similar vibe about them all. This is mostly due to the same mini games popping up and there being very little different between the clients you get. It would be nice to introduce different locations like a bowling alley, pool hall or maybe even a bar?

Yet for causal play, this isn’t a big problem but the price just feels a little too much for a mobile game adapted for consoles.

Overall Kitty Power's is a delightful and charming game that's ultimately best played for causal instalments. It's brought forward onto consoles from a mobile game and while I do enjoy the aesthetics and sweet nature to the game, there's very little grasp and substance to keep you going for the long haul.

++ Cute visuals
+ Nice dating sim that involves LGBT
+ Good for causal play

- Very repetitive after a couple of hours
-- Lack of variation in mini games
-- High Price for a console adaption of a mobile game

A PS4 review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review