Cake, my nemesis, we meet again. Your delicious moist full flavoured presence plagues my every move. For those that have no idea what I am talking about you will probably need to continue reading to understand exactly what Fat Princess is, those that already know how cake comes into it might want to keep reading to see if the price of admission is worth it.

If Fat Princess were a first person shooter game mode it would be, for the most part, capture the flag, this is at its core what you should be expecting. The top down birds eye view of the game lets you see yourself and the surrounding area of the map, you are a little villager that can assume the roll of many different classes of characters by donning the hats of your desired load out. Worker, Priest, Warrior, Archer and Sorcerer each have their unique abilities and can be upgraded to give new powers. The hat switching can be done in real time game play and you can even wear the hat of a fallen/comrade rather than having to traipse back to the castle to change your attire.

There are more than the primary gameplay mode of capture the princess such as death mode or a land grab based, if we are being honest though you only see the full capabilities of the game and it’s strategies come into play in the Capture the Princess mode.

If you are familiar with Castle Crashers you might already have an idea of how Fat Princess is styled graphically. Colourful, simple, clean, cute, brutal, all appropriate words to describe what you see. As battle heats up and groups of combatants gather together in a maelstrom of chaotic mashery things get a little hectic, there is a hint during the start up sequence that advises that keeping an eye on what is happening is the key to success. That’s like asking me to put 3 cats 2 dogs and a chicken into a 40 gallon drum, shake it up and keep my eye on the cat with the slightly gimpy front left paw.

Balance is a difficult thing to talk about with this type of game, strategies and team mechanics will evolve given enough time as players learn the intricacies of the game, the first week from release meant that most of the games I joined were spam fests. I would love to be able to play this game with a bunch of friends and have a really good strategic game, the problem with that happening is the price point, why someone thought that it would be a good idea to release this at 30$ is beyond my comprehension. I would hat thought that 15$ or 20$ at the most would be more palatable and perhaps encourage a community to grow around it. The lag is noticible at some points and without a strong local community behind it and peer to peer or closer servers this isn’t going to go away in a hurry.

Closing Comments

Fat Princess is a good game, that’s not the issue, the problem is getting value for money. It is deep enough in it’s class system and there are enough little tricks and secrets to discover to provide a real benefit for experienced players. If you like quirky online games and are not overly concerned with price then Fat Princess might be the cup of tea to wash down your morning cake.

P.S. Thinking a kiss could cure an eating disorder is just silly.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 11:27 am and is filed under Playstation 3, Reviews, sidefeature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.