Review: Fat Princess

by: Jeff Wimbush

Fat chicks are world renowned for their ability to provide shade in the summer and warmth in the winter.

But one advantage to having an overweight mate is often overlooked: their resistance to being kidnapped because they’re so difficult to move.

Fatties rejoice! Your ability for staying in one place is finally being recognized.

This principal is an important strategic element in the cartoonish PSN title Fat Princess.

Fat Princess is a simple online strategy game with a medieval style. The main game mode is based on a variation of capture the flag where the flag is a princess with an insatiable appetite for cake.

Players can gather pieces of cake that appear throughout the battlefield and feed them to the princess, eventually fattening her up and making her harder to steal. It’s a funny twist on the standard resource gathering formula and it’s much more satisfying to feed your princess than it is to collect wood or stone. It’s a hilarious visual when one player struggles to carry a flabby princess only to be swarmed and sliced to pieces by the opposing team.

And funny moments like that are where this game shines. There is a perfect mix of the cartoonish look and blood and guts action. It’s funny to see the blood pooling under a cute looking character while he lets out a death rattle in a high pitched voice. Where the game runs into issues is balance between the classes.

There are five classes to choose from and they are pretty standard. The warrior uses a sword and a spear. The priest can heal teammates and drain life from enemies. The worker can chop down trees, mine stone and throw bombs. The ranger uses a bow and a rifle. The mage uses magic to either momentarily freeze or set afire the enemy. Players switch classes by putting on the designated headgear that can be collected from killed players or at the spawn points. Every class can be upgraded through collecting resources. Players can then switch between the two versions at the press of a button.

I found the upgraded worker to be the strongest class, being the only one capable of collecting resources and having a devastating range attack. This was reflected in many of the matches I played where a majority of players choose only workers and the battlefield became chaos with bombs exploding everywhere. It takes some of the fun away from the game when you feel forced into choosing one class because all the others are too weak.

Another problem is with the A.I. When there aren’t enough human players to fill a match, A.I. characters fill the gap. The problem is that they are really stupid. A.I. characters often pick one task and focus on it, like collecting wood, even when the princess is being carried past them by the opposing team. As a result, whichever team has more A.I. characters seems to always lose. Even though there’s an option to switch sides, few people choose to when they’re slaughtering the other team.

The game offers eight maps and a couple other game modes including a straightforward death match, a capture –and-hold mode called invasion, and a soccer mini-game that looked like it could have been fun which no one seems to play online. They all work well but are not as much fun as rescuing a flabby princess.

And that’s pretty much all there is to this game. It becomes obvious how simple a game this is when you go through the” how to play” section and there are only two buttons to learn. Almost every action is performed by pressing either square or circle.

The simplicity is both good and bad. Fat Princess is very easy to pick up, but for the same reason it can get boring after awhile.

A simple strategy title like this is perfect to play with a group of friends. If you have even one loyal friend to plan a strategy with you can do quite well on the battlefield, and it only gets more fun the more friends are involved. So if you have any friends who own ps3’s and are interested in Fat Princess, $14.99 is a good deal for this game. This is especially good value considering you can share PSN titles with up to five friends.

If you don’t have PS3-playing friends, then this game doesn’t have much to offer. Playing with random people, who give no reaction when you try to form a strategy with them, ruins a game like this. There is an option to play offline but I don’t know why anyone would. In the game’s main menu, the offline mode is labeled “play with yourself.” I recommend avoiding it in favour of the real thing.