Look At All The Pretty Colours!

Developer: Namco Bandai Games

Publisher: Namco Bandai Games

Someone over at Namco has taken all the drugs. All of them. Gobbled them up like pre-awesomeness Robert Downey Jr. crossed with a Dyson hoover. That is the only explanation I can come up with for this game. My screen looks like I’ve eaten all of the Skittles in the world and then vomited them up all over the place, leaving cascades of burningly bright colours everywhere. My eyes hurt. My brain hurts from trying to comprehend the madness before me as I control a tiny little man (who I’m told is a prince) with a jelly bean head, as he rolls an enormous ball of really sticky stuff around the place picking up books, coins, cattle, washing lines, people, trees and eventually planets. I wish I was making this up.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to the madness that is Katamari. Let’s begin with a little bit of background to the madness: The first game, Katamari Damacy, was a low-level Japanese affair made for less than $1 million and released on the PS2. Basically, the King of  All Cosmos had fucked up a little bit, gone bat-shit crazy and destroyed a load of stars, planets and constellations and it was up to his son, a spindly midget, to roll up loads of crap from all over the universe using a very sticky ball. Bat-shit crazy is a pretty good definition of this series actually. Imagine if Mariah Carey or J-Lo or any other diva to be honest had one of their rants and went round messing stuff up, but instead was brightly coloured, and male, and dressed in a ruff and a Christmas cracker, and bearded and then a minion of theirs with stunted growth development had to find loads of crap and no…..there’s absolutely no way to make any of this pertain to reality. Sigh.

Damacy became a sleeper hit, going on to do well in the States as well as Japan and spawning a shedload of sequels. Which brings us to Beautiful Katamari. The game starts with the King playing a bit of tennis before (being the powerful, mentalist deity that he is) a particularly strong serve rips a hole in the universe and creates a monster black hole that sucks everything but Earth into an acid-tinged oblivion. The Prince has got a bit of a job on his hands in this one. So off you roll, starting with replacing moons, then planets, then stars before finally trying to plug the goddamn black hole. The levels are all timed to begin with, and some of them have random little caveats and special tasks helpfully tossed in there by the King to make it more interesting: things like elevating the temperature of your katamari by only collecting hot things like microwave ovens and pizza. The score is then tallied at the end based on how big your katamari is (this is a game where size matters), how well you’ve completed the set task for that level and the time you took. If you get a perfect score, you get to run around the same level with no time limit whatsoever, where you roll for as long as you like to your heart’s content.

Now although I’d heard of the series and had dabbled slightly at a mate’s house,  I’d never played Damacy or any other incarnation of a Katamari game. I came to this velcro balled extravaganza as quite the newbie….and I was quite disappointed. Let me explain. I remember when the demo came out. I was as happy as a fat man who’d just found an unattended Crispy Creme van. It gave you two minutes of rolling bliss. The controls were a problem at first but I quickly adjusted. I laughed at the crazy dialogue. I cackled a little too maniacally as I picked up my first dog. I cackled even more when I rolled over two people and watched them try and wriggle and squirm their way free from the threat of my sticky ball. MWAHAHAHA! Ahem…I couldn’t wait for the full game. What more crazy shenanigans could there be?

The answer is…..none. Not really. Beautiful Katamari feels like someone took a great little quirky arcade game at put it on a torture rack. The gameplay quickly gets strained and repetitive. The soundtrack whilst quirky and fun at first rapidly becomes hideously irritating and stuck in your head. And when I say stuck in your head I don’t mean in the good way like in Ocarina of Time where you’d find yourself singing ‘Epona’s Song’ or the ‘Song of Storms’ months after you’d killed Ganondorf; I mean in the ‘I may try to bash this song out of my head’ kinda way. Having said that, putting one of your own soundtracks on changes the game completely. Listening to ‘Raining Blood’ whilst playing this game makes the whole thing a lot more sinister, and frankly much more entertaining. You will probably scare your housemates and neighbours but who doesn’t sometimes.

But wait! One of the big things that all of the publicity merchants went on about (apart from the fact that Microsoft somehow managed to steal this one right out from under Sony’s nose) was the new multiplayer. For the first time ever you could play Katamari with other people both locally and online. Oh the excitement! Yeah…..about that. The local modes suck mammoth ass.  Two player only and dire. One is just an awfully bland vs. mode that happens in The Most Boring Arena Ever. The other sees you try and control the katamari together around a normal level. This. Does. Not.

Work. At all. The controls are diabolical and the frustration may result in broken controllers due to hurling them at the wall or, worse, the screen. It comes across as the worst idea ever. Worse than beating a hornet’s nest. Worse than Meet the Spartans. Worse than Sierra thinking that the world needs another Leisure Suit Larry game. Not good.

It’s all been a little bit doom and gloom despite the funky pastel colours and the childish innocence so far. But Beautiful Katamari does get slightly better online. The lobby is great as you can just run around with Prince, dicking about and scoring goals by kicking balls through rainbows. The four player adversary mode online is a good laugh for a quick game. It’s basically the single player mode with four people. Or the local vs. mode in an actually realised world. You can do dash attacks to knock other katamaris off course and hopefully knock some of their items off in the process, and cookies are handed out at the end to the most aggressive players.

But does this make Beautiful Katamari a decent purchase? The big answer is no, not really. Yeah it’s fun at the start, and yeah the multiplayer is fun for a little while. It’s quirky and insane and bright and original. But that doesn’t stop it from spreading itself too thin. It feels a little bit like an EA game: nice ideas, quality sheen, dodgy design and unimaginative execution. A demo should showcase a game and leave you wanting more. There’s a big problem if all that there is to see is simply more of exactly the same. Good for a couple of minutes, but then you might as well just download the demo. It’s free! Disappointing.

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