#8 (Not so) Beautiful Katamari

For a week I had the chance to play Beautiful Katamari for about a week. I only got one or two evenings to give the game a chance - I had only just received the instruments for Rock Band, the sunday before :s.

For those not in the know, the premise of the game is to take a "Katamari", essentially a ball which everything sticks to, and roll it about collecting other objects to increase the diameter of the ball/katamari, with each level giving you a target diameter to work towards. When you start out, you can only roll over very small objects, but as your Katamari increases in size, so too do the objects you can now collect, and this leads to an exponential growth - the first metre seems to take an age, but the following metres come thick and fast.

Right, let's get down to the nitty gritty, the game itself is very original, I've certainly not played a game like it. That being said, there have been previous games on older consoles which have done principally the same. I did actually believe that the game had been ported from an old console version gamecube/ps2 etc but the 360 version is actually a seperate game in it's own right.

Having to navigate my silly wide-headed character to a load/save house in the level hub is frankly lame and felt terribly backwards.

I only thought it was a port as, graphically this is not a next-gen game. All the objects are terribly angular and poorly textured, if they textured at all. And believe it or not, the game does get some terrible slow-down at times, oh dear huh?

Whilst it is the first Katamari game I've personally played, and as I've mentioned I've not played anything like this before, this iteration of the game has not done anything new with the formula if a quick look up on wikipedia is to believed. So in that respect, the game isn't next-gen. Another terribly annoying feature is the complete lack of auto-save, I mean WTF. Having to navigate my silly wide-headed character to a load/save house in the level hub is frankly lame and felt terribly backwards. It's not as if an autosave would be a contraversial feature to add. The game is broken into very distinctive levels which have to be accessed via the level hub so it would be super convenient to auotsave after finishing a level. I only complain as I assumed that this feature existed and quitted out (probably to go play Rock Band) and when returning to Beautiful Katamari, my progress had not been saved. LAME.

The gameplay itself is pretty cool, although I didn't seem to be very good - the King kept asking me why I bothered, well Kingsy, I might just pack it all in together. Now I only played a few evenings, I didn't complete the game, I got a few achievements for my trouble and at the time it was very fresh. My fear is that the game will get very same-y after a while as there's not a lot that can be done with the formula. One level had me collect "hot" things but that was probably one of the most frustrating levels I managed to play.

Overall, I would say that Beautiful Katamari is a good game, nothing special but unique enough to warrant a try, especially if like me you've not played any of the previous games in the series. It's worth a go but not without it's faults, especially when if you're looking for worthy games for your next-gen xbox 360.