Reinventing capture the flag, Fat Princess produces a strategic experience while never losing its playful charm.
Available to download from the Playstation Store, Fat Princess certainly puts an amusing twist on a standard multiplayer concept, where up to 30 players can battle it out online. Divided into team red and yellow, both have a castle serving as their home base with the enemy's Princess kept in the dungeon, and an empty throne waiting for the team's own Princess to be rescued from the enemy castle, and brought back to it. The aim of the game: rescue your own team's Princess by carrying her back to your throne, while keeping the prisoner held firmly in sight. Sounds simple, but any lone character that picks up the Princess walks a lot slower. Dotted around each map are pieces of cake that can be brought to your enemy's Princess and fed to her, causing her visibly bulge more and more. The trick is to keep your Princess well fed so that any poor sap who attempts any bold heroics will be reduced to a literal crawl… and hastily decapitated. It's capture the flag… only with obese ladies.
It's also worth mentioning that while this is the main and most addictive game mode, there are a few others. For example, capturing the other team's princess and bringing her back to your prison three times to win the game, a single player arena mode where you must face waves of enemies without dying, and the team deathmatch mode - arguably very pointless in a game like this.
Whichever mode you choose, there are six classes to choose from in order to get the job done – the villager, Priest (the medic), Mage, Worker, Ranger and Warrior (the human tank). You always start as the lowly villager who is completely unarmed with low health, but incredibly fast with the ability to 'slap' items out of other players' hands. Becoming one of the other classes is a little interesting – each has a retrospective hat dispensed from a machine in your castle, so just pick it up by pressing circle to switch to that class! You can also pick up class hats off of dead opponents, so quickly swapping from one class to another couldn't be any simpler. Each has a unique weapon to kill foes with. And characters die in such over-exaggerated, chunks-of-red-gore fashion. It's funny to watch, and a nice contrast to the cute, cel-shaded visuals. Though not combat orientated, the worker shines as the essential team class. A HUD displays how many hearts of health you have, and how much wood and metal your team has collected. Targeting a tree (wood) or rock (metal) and repeatedly tapping square will break a piece free. Everyone can this up and carry it to their home castle or lob it into a friendly outpost, adding to the communal resource pot and nabbing you points. But it's the worker's ability to build doors on your castle, ladders and springboards for infiltrating the enemy base and upgrade the class hat machines which makes him indispensible in winning. So at the beginning of a game, most players usually start off as the worker.
However, some classes do feel a bit overpowered, namely the Dark Priest and Ice Mage. Dark Priests (which follow the same principle, only with sucking health from enemies rather than healing teammates) have the farthest-ranging attack over anybody else; so a few of them grouped together at a vantage point can be next to impossible to hit. Hopefully this will be balanced out a little more in the rumoured upcoming patch which also hints at new classes, so watch this space.
Combat is simple and the controls are a breeze to use, with the same buttons mapped out whichever class you use – L1 to lock onto an enemy, circle grabs any items lying around on the battlefield, a short tap of square to attack an enemy (or build as the worker) or holding it down for a charged attack, and triangle to switch easily between the standard and upgrading type of any class.
So underneath all this hilarity, it's clear to see that Fat Princess is actually a tactical little game, where teamwork and effective use of classes are key to winning. Do you and a couple of other people on your team use your own catapult to send yourself flying into the enemy castle and take them by surprise? Does the rest of the group distract the enemies while one sneaky villager runs in using one of the map's secret passages and nabs the princess whilst everyone else is occupied? There are so many ways of doing things that Fat Princess has huge strategic potential, and often no two matches are the same. Players will find that a headset can be a godsend in co-ordinating these kinds of attacks, so it's generally a good idea to stay in groups – running off Rambo style is a big no-no.
Every kill or class-unique action bags you vital points, and after each match you'll see if you were lucky enough to gain a rank. This works by averaging scores from your last few matches. The game doesn't tell you this though, and it's a bit stilted - one good match can often see you jumping up two or three ranks at a time, while a bad match can have equally the same effect. It's also hard to say how long matches last because the problem is that they can range from quick affairs of luck with one team managing to nab the princess in about 5 minutes, to equally good teams slogging away for over half an hour with the match showing no signs of going either way. Finding a game is usually a straight forward affair, albeit somewhat marred by occasional errors when trying to connect to the game host. Empty player spaces are filled by AI but you're rarely at a shortage of human opponents. Despite server issues, though, once you do jump into a game it's guaranteed to be hectic, and you'll be aching for another match as soon as it's over. Fat Princess is one of the most addictive PSN titles out there, with that "just one more match!" reaction, and because the game never truly ends, the replay value stays in tact.
A short single-player story mode is also included, but this simply exists more as a tutorial to get you to grips with the different modes and classes. Online multiplayer is where the real fun's at, and it's easy to see that this is what Fat Princess was built for. Admittedly, for £11.99 the price tag is a tad steep. But despite some class imbalances and server issues, Fat Princess is worth every penny and an absolute must-add to your PSN library.
- By Hayley Woollard.