Fat Princess: review

 

Caaaaaaaaaakkkkkeee!!!

 

 

• Unleashed:   Out Now (PSN)
• Publisher:     Titan Studios
• Developer:    Sony Online
• Players:         1 (offline), 1 – 32 (online)
• Price:              £11.99

 

Unlike most other sites, we waited for the patch so we could give this game a review fair to developer and gamers alike. So now you can connect…should you want to?

The first thing to strike you about Fat Princess is the graphics. The brightly coloured cel shading, combined with cartoony environments and super deformed – style characters, would look perfectly at home in a Wii game. There’s plenty of blood, but nothing particularly graphic, and it can be turned off if you wish. We’d love to see more of the same in other ps3 games; this style is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Offline, the game offers you little more than training for online play. Outside of setting up a bot match, you are offered two game modes. ‘The Legend Of The Fat Princess’ is a short string of matches designed to get you used to the different match types, character classes and maps, awkwardly tied together by a largely irrelevant story. ‘Gladiate’ is a series of twelve battle arenas for each of the five character classes; and will require several dozen hours of cursing and teeth grinding to complete.

The five classes are Mage, Priest (who can heal others), Ranger, Warrior, and Worker. You choose a class simply by picking up the relevant hat, and you can change classes in this way at any time anywhere you find a hat (either spat out by a machine, or dropped by another player upon death). Differences between classes are huge, and important. Do you go for a Warrior with six hearts of health but no projectile attacks, or a Worker who has just four hearts of health, but is the only class able to build and repair defences and siege devices?

Such building and repairing is just as important as slaughtering the opposition. The main game modes are so similar to capture the flag, we’re surprised Titan managed to resist a Capture The Flab mode. Each of the eight main maps has two castles, one at each end. The basic idea is that your princess is held captive in the enemy castle, and you need to bring her back. Keep her (and the enemy’s princess) in your castle for long enough, and your team wins the game. Easy enough, right?

Nope. Firstly, the game mechanics ensure this is not the case, which is only right. The princess must be carried by a character, who will move slower and not be able to attack or defend whilst carrying her. Each team is able to feed their actually rather slender princess pieces of cake. She starts getting fatter and fatter, until she eventually looks less like princess Leia and more like Jabba The Hut. The fatter the princess, the slower the character carrying her moves. In addition to this however, the princess will lose weight in minutes if not fed, until she is her slimmer self once more (insert your own joke about how that doesn’t apply to your girlfriend/wife/mother in law here).

Unfortunately, online matches usually fall into one of two categories: a war of attrition, where neither side makes progress, or a massacre, where one team storms the enemy castle in a massive group and proves unstoppable.

So why do we love it so? The fact that there’s depth we don’t have space or time to go into here? The Team Deathmatch and Invasion modes that ignore the princesses entirely? The satisfaction we get from killing a player trying to get easy kills from up high or round a corner? The surprising number of players willing to help you out when you need it?

The price tag took us aback at first; but so long as you realise this is an almost exclusively online game, and you’re willing to put up with a small amount of lag on occasion, it manages to give great value for money.

 

4/5