This is a Katamari Knock-Off and nothing more. It's got its charm but it has it has more than enough flaws as well.

User Rating: 5.5 | The Wonderful End of the World PC
Welcome to the Wonderful End of the World. This game is available as a download through the popular Steam service. I'm not sure if you can download it anywhere else or get a hard copy in stores. You play the role of a rather calm and casual looking goddess who sees that the earth is being destroyed by an ancient fish-headed god. She can't intervene and stop this from happening so she must save everything on earth to be transported elsewhere. You control her puppet that can bond with anything, and eventually everything, around it and that is how she is going to save the world. You start out tiny, and only the smallest of random objects may stick to you. As you grab items that are no bigger than the puppet, it gets bigger and can suck in bigger objects. Eventually it can get so big that nothing in the game world won't stick to it. The larger it gets the harder it becomes to control. Where its footsteps originally make no noise at all when you get big enough each footfall sounds like thunder and the puppet becomes a little more unwieldy. You run against a timer and based on your score you get a letter grade. You must get a certain letter grade or better in order to open new areas. There are only 12 levels all together and the 12th only becomes available after you score an "A" or higher rating in the first 11 levels.

This lack of levels is the first short-coming. The time limit never exceeds two minutes so if you can get an "A" grade on all 11 levels in one shot you're going to spend less than 30 minutes playing this game. Considering the simple premise and obvious lack of time in development I don't think it unrealistic to ask that the developers give us more than a dozen levels. Yes, beating the initial 11 levels at all unlocks two new modes of play for each level. The first being "Untimed" where you can take all the time you want to absorb all of the objects in a level and upon absorbing all of them the round ends and they post and save your completed time for posterity's sake. The other is "World Explorer" and doesn't have a time limit but does not end after you've absorbed 100% of the objects in a level. This is handy to help you strategize your assault if you're having trouble earning an "A" in a particular level.

The premise of the game should sound vaguely familiar and once you begin playing the game you'll see that it looks familiar as well. It has horribly polygonal characters and objects and everything hued in eye-sore, cutesy pastel primary colors. There is minimal sound and an absolutely abhorrent sound track that consists of just a few songs, all of which become incredibly painful after about 5 seconds. This game is either incredibly "Japanese" or one of the worst poseurs of all time. Either way, you would think that this minimalist approach to the graphics would make it run smoothly on just about any system. Status: FAIL. This game bogs down terribly and from my system it is not putting a terrible strain on my GPU's or CPU. Then cap that with the horrid collision detection and glitchy movement controls and you've got yourself a nice little headache in the making. You will often find yourself wedged into corners or stuck under objects like tables other world bric-a-brac. You will have to pace back and forth over the same item many times in order to pick it up. Often you will find a path of similar objects like paving stones in a back yard or decorative lamps and hedges and you still have to walk back and get the 3 or 4 that glitched and stayed on the ground. The game has issues with what it judges to be "bigger" than you and you will often find yourself bouncing off of something that looks significantly smaller than you. You will find that time and time again. This wouldn't hurt the game with me so much if it were just me putting the title under intense scrutiny but these issues will definitely affect even novice players.

This game was definitely designed to be a time-killer and nothing else. The time limit for most levels is under 2 minutes and the user interface is minimal at best. That is a con to me because I believe a time killer should never exceed $5. This one cost me $8 and is usually priced at $10. With its total lack of depth and painful play control if you're absolutely desperate for a Katamari knock-off for your PC and have $10 you don't mind burning, knock yourself out. If you're looking for this game to another innovative diamond in the rough like so many other downloads Steam has hosted you should probably looks elsewhere.

Author's Note: This review would have been longer had there been more game to play.