Fat Princess is not your average game on the market. I mean what other game ever created uses cake to feed a princess subsequently making her fatter so that she is heavier to carry. It’s comical genius. Titan Studios have conjured up this adventurous idea and at the high PSN price of £11.99, I was expecting great things.
Fat Princess as its namesake suggests is all about the Fat Princess. The main single player action happens in the campaign mode known as the Legend of the Fat Princess. This takes you through a series of comic like storylines jumping from mission to mission in order to save the princess. This also allows you to gain a slice of each game type and prepare you for what the game was designed for, multiplayer.
The campaign isn’t bad but it also isn’t great mainly down to the fact that the AI doesn’t co-operate and help you out. I felt like a lone wolf on the battlefield in most of the missions as I struggled to complete each quickly. Why am I trying to complete the missions quickly? Well, if you go down the AI’s game plan the game just lasts for ages, and I mean ages. In one mission I had time to go down for dinner, have some cake myself, and then return to the screen to see we have advanced no further. They don’t seem to rush to the objective and I may as well not be there if I do it their way. The best thing to do in Fat Princess, minus having some cake while playing, is to jump straight into the online side of things.
Up to 32 cake loving players can fire into any of the 4 available game modes. This is of course server permitting as depending on your internet connection speed, some gamers could be sacrificed for the server friendly AI players. Team Deathmatch starts both the old skool red and blue team with a set amount of points with every death taking a point away from your teams score. First team to zero loses. Invasion mode plays out similar to team deathmatch in that although you have to gain points by capturing outposts, button mashing attacks prevail and heads will eventually roll.
The standout and premier game mode is ‘rescue the princess’ where each team has the others princess in their respective base. The objective is to come up with a strategy to retrieve your princess while at the same time managing to keep their princess captive. Why add the Fat word to the name of the game though? Well in order to make it harder for the opposing them to retrieve their princess, you can collect slices of cake that are scattered over the average sized maps and feed them to the princess. You can fill in the blanks as to what happens, but let’s just say the princess grows some spare tyres in a few places. This makes the princess harder and slower to move, allowing you to kill the enemy and steal the princess back. The winner is the first one to successfully retrieve their own princess back for a period of time while still holding the enemy’s princess captive. This is best played online due to the fact that you can co-operate and organise attacks with fellow online gamers.
Co-operative play is one element that is a primary element to both enjoy the game and win in a convincing manner. There are 6 different classes which your player can control and each class has different capabilities. Every player starts of as a villager who might not have a lot of health, but is the fastest player in the game. To become another class like the warrior you have to acquire the respective hat from the hat machine located within your base or from hats that are lying around on the battlefield. These hat machines can be upgraded when you have the right resources and provide you with better weapons and faster building skills. It’s also crucial to have a variety of different players around at the same time. For example having a Priest nearby who might not be able to kill anyone will be able to heal any players nearby. You have the mage who can shoot fire and when upgraded, freeze enemies nearby slowly draining their life away. If you like keeping your distance from the enemies you can don the ranger hat who can shoot arrows or use the ever destructive shotgun, but by far the most important class is the worker.
The worker may not be the most destructive class available but it is certainly the most tactical. You need workers to chop down trees and grab some stone to provide resources for your base, furthermore allowing you to upgrade the hat machines and make the classes extra special. As the worker you can also erect ladders to help jump into the enemies base to steal the princess, construct a catapult that can throw your entire team over to the other base, and when required re-construct certain parts to the base that may have been damaged in battle. They don’t get as much glory as the other classes, but it certainly is one of the more important classes in the game, predominately when playing the objective game types.
While most of your time will be spent eating cake playing the ‘rescue the princess’ mode online, it’s also worth mentioning that there is a mode for all you football fans out there. Yes, you heard me correct as gamers can take to the field and play the beautiful game that is soccer. This fun havoc creating game mode sports the ‘jail rules’ of football where anything goes as long as you can get the ball into the net. It’s fun, exciting and a bit bizarre at the same time.
The artistic Castle Crasher-esque feel to the game provides comical yet HD stunning visuals, which you can see for yourself in the screenshots provided. It’s really the icing on the cake and for a game that incorporates so much blood and gore; it really makes the whole experience fun and pleasant. The game just oozes with colour straight from the starting menu to the credits at the end of the game.
While the game does have its flaws in poor AI and the sometimes never ending games, the colourful comical gore ridden game, as well as the catchy game title, did manage to grab my attention. What essentially is capture the flag has really been tarted up and it is to no surprise that Sony feels the game is worth the hefty price tag of £11.99. This game is certainly worth checking out, especially if you have a few friends who also have the game. It’s definitely one of the better games available on the PlayStation Store.
