Fat Princess Beta Hands-On

In the history of video games, there has never been a title quite as bold as Fat Princess. On paper, it seems designed to lambast political correctness, because you must feed cake to a young princess and make her so fat that she can't be abducted by the opposing team. In reality, though, it's just a charming and humourous twist on traditional multiplayer team-based gameplay. Not only that, but it has plenty of depth to offer anyone who really wants to get into it. We found ourselves playing many hours of the beta, since we were lucky enough to play the game early alongside many GameSpot community members.

The beta offers support for up to 32 players online, which makes for some fairly hectic battles. At the beginning of each round, you start out in a castle that houses your princess, and it's your job to protect her while also trying to steal the enemy's princess. You can make your princess fatter by feeding her cake, and a fatter princess means more people are required to carry her. You can play the game just as you like, running around and attacking people at random, but this is a strategy game at heart, and it works best when you have many different classes working together towards a common goal.

The class system is interesting because you can constantly switch between five different classes just by picking up different hats. You can be a swordsman, an archer, a wizard, a worker, or a priest, and each of them has strengths and weaknesses. The swordsman, for example, has a shield that protects him from arrows fired by the archer, but he needs to get close to his enemies to attack. The priest is pretty rubbish in combat, but he can go around and heal other units, making him indispensable in battle. Perhaps the most interesting class is the worker, who is very weak but can run around chopping trees down for resources to make the rest of the squad more powerful. The great thing is that you can constantly change classes in the field by collecting hats from the machines in your castles or hats left behind from people who have been slain in battle.

The combat itself is very simple. You use the circle button to perform a basic attack, and you can hold it down for a charged attack. Holding the L1 button lets you lock on to enemies or objects, while the triangle button lets you change weapons, if your class offers multiple options. If there aren't any priests around, you can recharge your energy by sitting down somewhere quiet, at which point your character pulls out some cake to eat. Fat Princess may boast cute cel-shaded visuals, but it also features some hardcore images: blood splatters everywhere, body parts fall to the ground, and your princess grows ever more humongous.

The beta is sadly limited to the one map called Black Forest, but we were able to play both the Rescue the Princess and the Team Deathmatch modes. The former is essentially capture the flag with a cake-eating twist, while Team Deathmatch is all-out mayhem. Another feature of Fat Princess is that you can customise your character by choosing a hairstyle, beard, and eye colour. There's not much of a tutorial in the beta, just a written guide to the different classes, but the game is simple enough that you'll get the hang of the basics once you start playing. That said, there's also plenty to learn as you play, and we had the most success wearing a headset and working out tactics with other members of our team.

Fat Princess is yet another highly original game for the PlayStation Network, and we love what we've played so far. The game still has a release date of "TBA," but with such a polished beta, we hope the finished game will be reaching us soon. Keep an eye out for more information as we get it.