CES 2009: Fat Princess Hands-On

Fat Princess has been on our radar since the cartoony action game first appeared at E3. The game's cute exterior hides a challenging experience that puts a whole new spin on the standard capture-the-flag formula. We had a chance to try out an updated version of the game that featured more polish than its debut last year. Boasting cleaner visuals, refined control, polished-up gameplay, and improved audio, the game is shaping up to be a lot of fun.

Fat Princess's premise is simple. You play as a member of a group of peasants feuding with one another. As part of this conflict, your princess has been swiped. Your goal? To get back your special lady, who is now held in the enemy's castle. Now, to be fair, you've got their princess in your castle as well, so it's only to be expected that there are going to be some bad feelings on both sides. To set things right, you'll have to balance getting your girl back with collecting resources, fortifying your own castle with defenses, leveling up your team's skills, and fattening up your hostage.

Resource collecting revolves around mining and deforestation, which yield rocks and wood respectfully. Fortifying your castle requires combinations of wood and rock to create doors and other upgrades. While collecting resources could get tedious, you'll find outposts strewn throughout the map that you can claim as your own. Once you've taken an outpost, you can dump your rock and wood resources there and have them added to your stockpile. The outposts also offer an alternative way to heal your units besides sitting down and letting your health regenerate. Leveling up your team's skills also requires a wood and rock combo, although the process is a bit more intricate given the different skills in the game.

You and your troop of peasants can take on one of five classes by donning a decorative cap during the action. You'll have workers, rangers, warriors, priests, and wizards. Workers are key for gathering resources and building structures. While they're not great at melee, they can get by because of their speed. Rangers are distance fighters thanks to their use of bows and arrows. Warriors use swords to slice and dice enemies. Priests heal you during battle. Finally, wizards cast mighty elemental attacks, such as fireballs, that you can use to fry your foes. To level up these abilities, you'll need to upgrade the buildings within your castle that are pumping out the hat specific to each class. Your characters can then gain a secondary skill that lets you dole out more damage. For example, rangers can upgrade to carry shotguns that they can swap in for their primary weapon whenever they they want.

All of the above work won't matter much if you lose your hostage princess, so you must ensure that she's not too easy to rescue. While fortifying your castle is important, stuffing her with cake you'll find strewn throughout the level is key. The more cake you feed her, the bigger she'll get and the harder it will be for an enemy to swoop in and carry her off. The more whalelike your princess gets, the more slowly anyone carrying her will move, which will give you a fighting chance at catching them and stopping them.

Given the game's hectic pace, it's nice to see that the control scheme is straightforward. Despite the game's unfinished state, the controls were good and responsive, which kept the action fun. You'll be able to run, jump, attack, pick up items, and target enemies in no time because of the simple layout. Attacks can be charged by holding down the attack button, which calls up a meter that slowly fills. When the meter is full you'll unleash a powerful attack when you release the button. The downside to the attack is the charge time, which leaves you vulnerable; the upside is that the attacks are one-hit kills.

The visuals have the promising start of some personality thanks to the game's whimsical art style. The various peasants look deadly serious, no matter what outfit they're wearing. The princess is a bit on the clueless side, but that all works with the game's amusing look. The environments we saw featured bright color palettes and a lot of variety. Besides the expected forest-with-castle locale that we've seen, we saw a level set among mountains and cliffs that was connected by bridges. However, our favorite so far is the island level called Sugar Cove, which replaces the standard castle with a pirate ship and gives you an island chain to work through. The game's performance slowed a bit during some of the more hectic action sequences when our band of peasants battled a comparable mob of enemies en masse, but otherwise the action moved along just fine.

The audio has gotten a distinctive boost since we last saw the game. Besides the expected audio for clashing swords and mining picks, the game now features a narrator who chimes in to offer status updates on your princess and base, particularly if they're in trouble. Due to the noise in the demo area and the television volume, we weren't able to make out everything that was said, but there were some chuckle-worthy lines.

Anyone looking for a funny, addictive multiplayer game for the PlayStation 3 will want to keep an eye out for Fat Princess. The game is already pretty fun, and we expect that's only going to improve as it gets polished up. Look for more on Fat Princess in the months leading up to its release later this year.