Fat Princess is one of the most highly anticipated PSN games coming out in 2009, and many PS3 fans are looking forward to this combination of cutesy cartoon characters and blood and gore. It is quite the interesting mix, and I was lucky enough to get a chance to try it out.
Most of you probably know the idea behind Fat Princess already. Basically it is like a medieval version of capture the flag. The enemy has your princess and you have theirs. The object of the game is to take your princess from the enemy's dungeon and get her safely on your throne. If you have possession of both princesses at once you have to hold out for a given amount of time, then your team wins. There are multiple classes available for use in your endeavor including an archer, a warrior, and a worker class. If you'd like to know more general information about Fat Princess then there are plenty of other articles out there, but for this impression I am going to focus specifically on what I have seen based on the beta, and the issues that the full game might exhibit as a result.
The closed beta for Fat Princess contained only one map - the one with two castles on opposing sides of a green field, with a lake at the bottom of the map. At first glance it is a fairly small and simplistic map, but you will soon find that there are many secrets to be found and exploited within it. Outposts can have secret passages directly into either castle, and there are even passages that lead directly from the dungeon into the lake in the middle of the map. One issue is that the map is easily learned because it is so small, so if you play the same map over and over again like I did you'll soon establish a routine that can take a bit of the fun and excitement out of each game. This can be easily remedied in the main game, but could be something to worry about if the main game comes with a low number of maps.
Visual presentation was about what you would expect if you've seen any of the video clips or pictures around. The adorable cartoon characters eviscerating each other always puts a smile on my face, even after so many hours playing the same map. You just never fully expect such a cute little warrior to have his head come flying off and spurt blood out by the gallon. Voice acting was a nice surprise. All of the characters have a high voice as you would expect, but what came as unexpected was the humorous banter that they will sometimes throw between each other while fighting, or the cries of "cakey please" as you pass the Princess. It's hilarious how her voice changes as she becomes more obese as well. The voice overs come off to me a lot like those in Worms, they help to set the whimsical mood of the title and keep everything light-hearted. Music was present, but was fairly forgettable.
I found that the best way to start a match was to pick up the worker hat and get to work gathering materials so that I could update the classes and build siege weapons to help my fellow teammates. It is important that you always power up your attacks by holding the Square button for around a second before releasing. This will increase the damage if you hit someone and greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to mine for minerals or chop down trees for lumber. Once you have fully upgraded each class you can take your pick of which offensive class you want to play to make the run at capturing your princess. My personal favourite for this was the warrior, because you get a lot of health and when upgraded you have the ability to charge at your enemies with a powered up attack from a pole arm.
The online functionality works well, but is missing some key features that one would normally expect from a game so focused on online multiplayer. The most notable missing feature is a server list to allow you to choose between ongoing matches to join. In the beta your only choice for online is to jump into a random match with a mode of your choosing, or join a friend if someone from your friends list is already playing. This can be an annoyance when you want to join a match, but would prefer to join one that contained mostly human players instead of bots.
The only other real problem with Fat Princess is that there aren't nearly enough people online, and yes, I realize that is an issue specifically with the beta, but it meant that I never really got a handle on how lag was handled by the servers or how games played out with fully player controlled teams. Therefore my time was spent playing in games largely populated by bots, which were serviceable, but also had issues. Sometimes you would see a bot just standing around or running around in a circle, but these bugs will almost certainly be addressed before the full game's release. One issue that might not be addressed is that bots only have one difficulty level, and they aren't exceptionally bright on this level. I rarely saw bots using the plethora of siege tools that I had set up as a worker and they were extremely bad at harvesting resources, so you really had to do it yourself if you wanted it to get done.
All of this said, I've had loads of fun playing Fat Princess over the last couple of weeks. I know I have focused on my issues with the beta, but I'd like to remind you that all of these issues are fixable and if they are all fixed I think that Fat Princess will have a chance at being one of the best games to ever come out on the PSN. I look forward to the full release in June.
NOTE: There is NO NDA on this version of Fat Princess!
