Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Mike Escobar

Modern RTS titles usually have all the bells and whistles – they have three playable sides, 3d rendered graphics, huge tech trees to improve your units, and an impressive single player campaign to work through before you venture out into the online jungle. 

But there was a time when RTS games were limited to just two sides and had the barest hint of a plot or single-player campaign.  This isn’t always a bad thing though; some of the greatest games ever have proceeded from the simplest of premises.  Classics such as Tetris, Asteroids, and Peggle have managed to take a straightforward idea (stacking blocks, shooting rocks, playing Pachinko) and create amazingly addictive gameplay.

Which brings us to Fat Princess.  This title artfully combines the innocence and simplicity of the earliest RTS games with HD graphics, solid sound, and a great blend of graphics and goofiness.  And your whole reason for battling these enemies is because you’re red and they’re blue (or you’re blue and they’re red, either way it’s a good enough reason for all-out war!)

It’s difficult to pin down the graphical style of Fat Princess.  The best description I can come up with is "it’s as if Quentin Tarantino was in charge of a remake of the original Legend of Zelda"

nbsp; Vibrant, 1080p graphics highlight your cute little minions as they carve a bloody swath through their enemies.  It’s glorious violence as you’ve never experienced it before!  Good news for all the parents out there, even at its most gory Fat Princess is still very cartoony in its violence.  For those that are extra squeamish, you have the option to turn off the blood and gore completely.

One of the really enjoyable additions to this game is how much you can customize your own character.  You start off with a wealth of options for your voice, sex, hairstyle, and skin color and throughout gameplay you get rewarded with even more choices.  This is a nice addition to all the Playstation trophies you can earn, giving you the flexibility to truly make your character unique.

 The sound and voice acting is serviceable throughout the game, but nothing really stands out.  The voice acting is appropriately cutesy, in keeping with the game visuals, and it’s worth a chuckle or two to hear your ‘toon rattle off threats like “come get some!” in a Papa Smurf voice.

One of the biggest drawbacks to playing RTS games on a console is that there are usually so many options that it’s hard to have the appropriate level of control to make the game still feel under your command.  Fat Princess addresses this in two ways; first of all, you only control a single character, with all the other ‘toons either being under AI control in the case of single play, or controlled by other players in the case of online play.  As any veteran of RTS games can tell you, having the AI so heavily involved can bring it’s own set of problems, particularly with pathfinding and other decision making, but Fat Princess has a solid AI that I never had too many complaints about.  More importantly, the other thing that Titan has done is to make the controls consistent throughout the game.  There are five classes that you can play in this game, and the controls are the same for all of them.  Circle always picks up an item, square always fires your current weapon, L1 is always lock-on a target, and triangle always toggles between your two weapons.  This consistency in the control scheme makes switching character classes incredibly easy, so that you spend more of your play time learning what your ‘toon is capable of, instead of learning how to control them.

At its most fundamental level, Fat Princess is a game of capture the flag, but with a princess playing the part of the flag.  You’re asked to accomplish this using one of the five character classes, which include:

• Worker – gathers resources, upgrades buildings, and can even build siege engines!
• Wizard – alternating between fire and ice, this character hits hard but is easily killed
• Priest – the dark priest sucks life from enemies while the light priest heals allies
• Warrior – your basic hack ‘n’ slash grunt, the warrior hits hard and can block incoming damage with his shield
• Ranger – this ranged damage ‘toon can alternate between bow and shotgun, offering the choice between single target and area damage

Utilizing this motley assortment of characters, you attack the enemy’s castle in order to rescue your princess while at the same time keeping the other side’s princess in your own castle.  Once you break into the other stronghold, you just pick up the princess and run with her back to your own castle.  Once both princesses are safely within your castle, you have to protect them for a short time and then you’ve won the match.

There’s one twist though – scattered about the map are slices of cake.  If you carry the cake back to a princess and feed it to her, she’ll start getting fatter.  This makes her more difficult to carry, slowing you down immensely and making it harder to run her back to your castle.  The most obvious strategy is to keep fattening up the enemy princess in your own castle, so even if the other side does get to her, they’ll be moving so slowly that they’ll be easy to catch up to, defeat, and return the princess to your custody.  This tiny twist in the way the princess is handled makes for a ton (pun intended) of fun in the strategy.

The other great twist is the use of hats.  The character class you play is determined by what hat you wear.  You start each match with nothing on your head and have to walk over to one of the machines in your castle, pick up a hat, and POOF, you’re that class.  Want to play a worker for a while in the early game?  Pick up the worker’s cap and you’ll be able to run faster while carrying resources, and be able to upgrade the hat machines in your castle as well as build a catapult to launch members of your team across the map.  Halfway through the game and bored with being a worker?  Pick up one of the horned Viking helmets at the warrior hat machine and POOF; you are now a weapon of mass destruction!  Not only that, you can also pick up the hats of people that have died elsewhere on the map, and they don’t even have to be from someone on your team!  Let’s say you’re out peacefully gathering wood to build your catapult and you see one of your teammates getting beat on – if you happen to see the priest hat from a fallen soldier on the ground nearby you can run over, slap it on, and right away start healing your teammate.  This flexibility in gameplay makes the matches very fluid, and really rewards a player that is observant and can react quickly.  Saying this game has a tech tree is a little bit misleading though – each of the hat machines only has one level of upgrade, so most of the resources that workers gather either go to building your catapult, or repairing your gates.  All in all, resource gathering is a very small portion of the strategy here.

Despite all the innovative twists in this game, Fat Princess is not without its own share of issues.  During the single player campaign (which is admittedly a very small part of the gameplay experience in this title) any of the AI workers can decide to upgrade a structure, using the resources which you’ve been diligently gathering.  This makes having any kind of build order for the upgrades that are available virtually impossible, and just a little bit frustrating.  In my opinion upgrades should only be able to be triggered by the player, not the AI and hopefully this will be addressed in a future patch.

Speaking of patches, it has to be mentioned that there was a major issue in the initial release of this game.  Sub-optimal networking code caused huge, intermittent lag in online games, making them virtually unplayable at times.  Titan Studios and Sony jumped on this immediately and were able to release a patch that addressed the issue in a single week.  At the time of this review players have reported that the patch seems to have resolved the lag issues and the developer should be congratulated for resolving this problem so quickly.

Online action and tons of replay value is really where this game really shines.  Being able to play with up to 31 other people in all the different game modes is great, and the ease with which you can change your character’s role keeps the game fresh and exciting.  Several game modes are available, including capture the flag (well, princess), team deathmatch, and tower control (domination).  All the gameplay modes are extremely well done and the variety of maps is excellent.  Persistent players will be able to find plenty of hidden shortcuts on the maps that can completely change a match, thereby rewarding observant gamers with an extra advantage.  At only $14.99, this game is one of the better values on PSN right now, and every fan of the genre should give it a try. Innovation has always been one of the cornerstones of the gaming industry, and Titan Studios deserves a round of applause for going back to the basics with this game, adding a nice little twist with the whole princess concept, and bringing us one of the better downloadable games of the year.

Gaming Trend Score

82

1. Graphics: 75
2. Audio: 80
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 87
5. Value/Replay: 75
6. OVERALL:82