Fat Princess, as I'm sure you've heard, is the new big thing on PSN, a multiplayer slaughter fest featuring a number of diminutive cartoon soldiers, their captive Princesses, and a whole lot of cake. The game features battles that can hold up to 32 participants, allowing for some epic style battles across a variety of maps with altering features, hazards, and even short cuts along the way. It's a really fun multiplayer romp with some incredible visuals on a 1080p set, and one that's worth picking up for every PS3 owner that's online with their system at the moment.
If you've missed out on the beta news and impressions from earlier in the year that managed to circulate the interwebs, the concept of the game is that you're either on the red or blue team, and you have a captive Princess situated in your castle. It's a bit of a capture the flag experience, with the end goal being that you want to get your Princess back and sit her on the throne in order to win the match. However, to make things a little more difficult, you can collect pieces of cake on the battleground and feed them to your captive Princess, thereby making her a fat mess and heavier to carry around for the opposing team. It's not a huge variation on your standard capture the flag mechanic, but the game has a few other things going for it as well.
Each side has their own base, or castle structure. Each castle has a number of machines or devices inside that pump out the hats you can select to wear, which in turn is how you choose your classes. When you begin you're not assigned to anything in particular, and you can switch out a class at any point simply by donning a new headpiece. You can even do this in battle, by taking the hats of the defeated friends and enemies around you, so it allows a certain amount of versatility to how you approach the combat.
The classes themselves have enough of variation between them to make them all worth checking out, but I think people will eventually settle into one or two defined roles for each round. There's your basic warrior class, which comes equipped with a shield and sword by default, but can switch out to a much larger two handed blade with the appropriate upgrades. There's the priest class, which is your primary healer, but there's also a dark priest that drains the life from foes. You've got a couple magic casters, on that's fire based that can also make an area of effect spell by holding down the attack button, and then an ice caster that can trap foes in place with their area of effect spell as well. Rounding out your main attacking units, you have the ranged archers, which can gain guns with upgrades, and finally there's the worker unit, mostly used to gather resources in the form of wood and metal on scattered about the battlegrounds.
The resource gathering is what sets the game apart from most capture the flag style games, at least for me. It's a bit of an RTS mechanic, sure, but the results a little more immediate. Workers can reinforce the doors of your castle (which enemies need to break down to bypass), create ladders and other structures to scale opposing castle walls, and finally gather the resources needed for the upgrades for the other classes. They're actually quite important to the game early on, and a surefire way to lose a round is by having everyone on offense and having no workers in sight.
Basically, what makes the game so much fun to play, outside of the outstanding visuals and deceptively cute brutality, is that the game is surprisingly deep. It might not look like it on the surface, or even after a few rounds of playing, but having a well rounded team and a group of players that can actually work together makes for a really satisfying gameplay experience in Fat Princess, and once all of that finally comes together for you, chances are this will be a hard game for you to actually stop playing. There are a few other modes, and a single player experience that really acts like a tutorial of sorts, along with a pretty brutal survival style mode, but the meat of the game is in the Princess capture/defense aspect, and it's easily the best reason to play the game. There are a hefty number of people online to play with, and while the game did have some serious connection issues when it launched, the new patch introduced seems to have eliminated that. I went from not being able to enter a match around 70% of the time, to being able to find a match every time I searched, with little lag to speak of. If you held off due to negative impressions last week, I think I can safely say that they've fixed whatever technical issues existed by this point.
All together, it's another fantastic entry into the PSN library, and should absolutely be held up there with other gems on the service. If you own a PS3, then you should own Fat Princess along with it, it's one of the better reasons to own the system at this point, and certainly a lot of fun to play.
