Preview: Fat Princess

It stands to reason that if you leave something sat around for years on end, its only exercise being carriage on the shoulders of others, it’ll eventually turn into a marzipan-scoffing fatso. Such is the fate of the ‘flags’ in classic game type Capture The Flag, which in Fat Princess have become two big-boned ‘beauties’ thrown into opposite dungeons. Always yelling and never full, they never quite get that while their captors scurry about in search of cakes, their chances of rescue sink deeper beneath their royal cheeks. This is a lightweight game in which rescue is seldom more than a few feet away, but when the captive is such a heavyweight, those feet can seem like miles.

A team wins by restoring its Princess to the throne without losing its own Prisoner. Between the two castles is a battleground full of trees (which workers can cut down to upgrade facilities), water (for drowning in), crossings (for creating flashpoints in the battle), ladders and stepping stones (for avoiding them), outposts (for increased productivity), and cakes (for gobs). Within each castle are machines which make class-defining hats and weapons, and two important shortcuts: an adjustable catapult which fires you over the enemy’s ramparts, and a boarded up whirlpool which leads underneath them. In short: all the key pieces of modern class-based CTF are here.

It’s a beautiful game, super-deformed, comically brutal, and lavishly animated from belly to back. Funny, too, as happy to quote Sir Mix-A-Lot (as you ‘fat out’ your prisoner: “God, Becky, she looks like one of those rap guy’s girlfriends”) as it is sending heads flying with geysers of cartoon blood. Those hats, meanwhile, ensure a frantic and unbroken pace. Casting you in a flash as a Ranger, Worker, Priest, Mage, or Warrior, they can even be retrieved from fallen comrades, meaning instantly reinforced and adaptable frontlines. Felling trees and literally tossing the timber into your machines will upgrade them, in turn promoting the hats they spit out and the classes they create.

But in the single map of its beta client, the problem is navigation. The top-down camera means there’s no instant look from a spawn point or parapet to see exactly where swords are clashing, who has the upper hand, or who’s closest to rolling her majesty out of jail. Instead, you have to summon a giant map, which obscures the screen while the game’s vague audio prompts provide little more than colour commentary. Non-interactive tutorial slides don’t help, setting up a game that isn’t hard to learn or master, just awkward.

A ten-stage singleplayer story, seven further maps, and three additional modes (Snatch ‘n’ Grab, Team Deathmatch and Invasion) provide plenty of room for improvement, the good news being that just minor tweaks should do it. Fat Princess has a delicious set of ingredients for a download title, perhaps the tastiest being its extension of basic interactions – grab, chuck, jump and fire - to almost every skill and tactic. But if it wants to hold its audience captive, the recipe isn’t quite there yet.