Based on
gamefaqs.com's most looked-up games, Fat Princess appears to have initially been a success or is at least generating a lot of web traffic. Having played for almost 10 hours since its release date, I've come away with some very mixed feelings.
Although I can say Fat Princess is a blast when your team knows what it's doing, there are some issues with the mechanics that can bog online games down. It's extremely visually appealing, sort of a hyper-cute bloodbath. Like most online games though, the quality of your experience is largely dependent on whom you're playing with.
The heart of Fat Princess is a sometime epic game of red vs. blue capture-the-flag with princesses serving as the flags. The game's title references player's ability to fatten the princesses up with cake, which makes them more difficult to carry. Players are cast in the role of soldiers in red or blue's army.
There are currently five playable classes, each featuring two skill sets:
- Warrior - A sword and shield melee class. The second tier warrior is a spearman who can do a charged leap forward.
- Ranger - A bow and arrow ranged class. The second tier ranger features a musket which must be fired from close range to maximize damage.
- Worker - A melee class that is used to gather resources and build machines. The second tier worker gains an area-of-effect bomb attack.
- Mage - A ranged caster class that casts single or area focused fire spells. The second tier mage has ice spells that impede opposing player's movement.
- Priest - A melee class that can heal teammates individually or in an area. Second tier priests can drain life from opposing players or throw curses that impede movement.
When you start playing or resurrect after being killed, your character is a neutral non-class. You pick your actual class by going to one of the five hat machines in your base and wearing the hat of the class you want. One can change classes at any time by grabbing a new hat.
As hat machines are upgraded, they also spit out other items any player can use, like bombs and potions that turn players into chickens.
I outline the basic structure of the game in an attempt to illustrate its potential complexity. Obviously, the game is ideally played with a group of people who understand what's necessary to win, i.e. upgrades need to happen as quickly as possible, a coordinated mix of classes works better than a trickle of random players creeping around, both tiers of each class should be used through an entire game depending on what's strategically best and above all, communication with teammates needs to be a priority.
Where I think the game falters is in its dependence on everyone having the same basic goals. Although Fat Princess has the aforementioned potential complexity, in execution it plays very similarly to something like Gauntlet.
The actions of each player are limited to a few simple moves. Although the game has underlying strategic elements, the typical battle is a chaotic mass of guys blindly hacking at each other.
This is where Fat Princess gets tripped up a bit. Because the game has such a simple appearance and interface, players are tricked into believing that the path to victory is also simple, which it is not. Traversing the level and killing random enemy players isn't really useful unless it's being done with a specific defensive or offensive goal in mind. Ultimately though, it's not necessarily a bad thing to be on a clueless team. If the other team knows how to play and steamrolls your team, you all move to the next game and life goes on.
When both teams know how to play just enough to keep each other from winning, Fat Princess turns into a mild form of torture, and it's this quality that needs to be addressed in a patch at some point. I've been in a few matches that lasted over an hour, which is a long time to be butting one's head against the same tiny level. I eventually left one match because it appeared no winner would ever emerge.
Not only does it suck the fun out of the game to play for so long with no discernible progress, it drives many players out, who are subsequently replaced with useless AI. No matter how hard it might be to get other players to focus on a single task, you can at least communicate with them. That I can tell so far, there's no way to give AI-controlled characters orders of any kind. This is adequate for the short single player campaign, but not against online opponents.
The interpretation of capture-the-flag I've played the most is Warsong Gulch battleground from World of Warcraft. It was actually my favorite battleground because the premise was simple enough for everyone to understand, but varied enough that it could be won using multiple strategies. In the past year or so, Blizzard streamlined the battleground to discourage the act of turtling, which seems to be the most agonizing aspect of Fat Princess.
Turtling, in this context, is essentially a wholly defensive strategy wherein the majority a team huddles around whatever it's supposed to protect and waits for the other team to come to them. In Fat Princess turtling results in an unending stalemate from which neither side can gain an advantage. It becomes not a test of who is more skilled at the game, but who has the patience to keep playing past a certain spirit-breaking point.
This isn't helped by the fact that the game is inherently designed to favor defense over offense. For example, when a player dies, he is respawned at a random point in his team's castle, nowhere else.
Let's say a raiding party attacks a castle holding an equal number of defenders. In the ensuing brawl, both teams die at about the same rate, but the defenders respawn right next to the continuing fight while the killed attackers respawn on the opposite side of the map. This encourages defenders to kamikaze their way into a raiding party, knowing that if they die, they will be back in the fight in about five seconds.
If the attacking side can organize either a large scale zerg rush or a two-pronged distraction / infiltration assault, a turtle can be smashed, but come on... this is the Internet we're talking about. Joining a random online group with any level of sophisticated organization is about as likely as winning the lottery.
For the time being, I'm still very much interested in playing Fat Princess depspite its flaws. The game is capable of being gloriously fun even when you occasionally have no hope of winning. The simple controls and presentation belie a serious game that requires some skill. It's entirely possible to run circles around less experienced players and be a killing machine.
I recall one game in which a teammate and I, he as a priest and I as a ranger, held a route into our castle against a dozen opposing players. I don't recall whether we won that game overall, but I cherished the feeling of accomplishment resulting from our small personal victory on that bridge. Fat Princess is far from perfect, but it can be damned satisfying.
screenshots from
gamefaqs.com and
gamespot.com
