Just available on PSN for the PS3 - a rather twisted take on team based capture the flag.
Fat Princess is a fairly simple game to explain. There are two teams, and each team has a castle. In their castle each team has a hostage - the other team's princess (who does actually look a lot like Peach from the Mario games. At least at the start). The object of the game is to rescue your princess from the opposition's castle, while still keeping your 'hostage' locked in your castle's dungeons. If a team manages to keep both princesses inside their castle for set period of about 20 seconds they win. Simple, yes?
Well no. This is where it gets twisted. Strewn throughout the land are slices of cake. If you carry the cake back your castle and feed it to your hostage, she puts on weight. The more weight she puts on, the harder it is for the opposition to carry her back to their castle. So you are encouraged to not only go after the opposition but to continually feed your hostage (they get thinner over time if they aren't fed cake. yes really.) as a form of defense.
Other than that, it's a fantasy themed class based CTF game. You have several classes - worker, warrior, archer, mage and priest. Each has special abilities and all the classes can be upgraded by workers collecting resources to feed to the 'hat machines'. The hat machines are an interesting part of the class dynamic. each machine produces an appropriate hat for a class - wizards pointy hat for mages, viking helmets for warriors etc - and to become a class, you simply pick up the relevant hat. You can thus swap classes at any time by grabbing a new hat and dead players drop their hats, so you can swap classes in the midst of combat if you wish. You can even loot the opposition's hats, although there's no provision for disguising yourself as the enemy like the team fortress spy. Upgrades include new weapons, AOE attacks and variant skills like changing the healing priest to a life draining dark priest.
Combat is fast and surprisingly bloody. You take about 5 hits (or one close range blunderbuss shot) to kill and you can lock on to a particular enemy both for ranged and melee combat. Dieing a lot is kind of expected but with fast respawns and the ability to change classes at will, life is refreshing cheap. Or it would be, if they hadn't taken the amusing decision to limit the total number of respawns per side - it's quite a high limit (I only saw it hit in one particularly violent game) but you do have to guard yourself to a degree.
Class combining tactics range from the immediately obvious - tank warrior backed by healing priest - to some more sophisticated combinations involving multiple spellcasters and players of the same class using variants on their upgrades. There are also tower 'hard points' to capture and defend which give your distance damagers a great advantage although in a very 'rock paper scissors' way there is a way to get them out that leaves you vulnerable to other things while you do it. I'm sure some fairly involved tactics will evolve over time.
There is a 1P game but its fairly perfunctory - an arena fighter using the standard game mechanics; almost a training level rather than a full game of it's own.
The presentation is first class. The game uses a cell shader engine with an isometric view; the overall feel is slightly similar to the Lego games, but with no shiny edges . The number of maps is fairly limited but they d have a lot of variety with different terrains, catapults that will flip you across the map or up cliffs, drawbridges and such like. All maps have multiple paths between castles but you do tend to get certain bottlenecks appearing. While the cartooney graphics suggest a kiddy friendly approach, the rest has a less benign spirit. Blood is sprayed over the landscape as battles rage, players are set on fire by lava or mage attack and run randomly screaming round the map until they expire or find some water. Your player is customisable to a degree - there are different hair and beard styles and colours, so you can be distinctive. Voice acting is particularly well judged - pixie-esque voices screaming battle cries and instructions while a Brian Blessed style narrator varies between fantasy storyteller and online gaming slang in a bizarre and occasionally endearing way. The game trophies are also well thought out, ranging from the 'is this on' trophy for playing five games, to a trophy that would require you to use all the classes' special abilities in very quick succession, which will require a lot of luck, finger skill and determination to achieve.
What could be better? A couple of things. The forced perspective can be a pain and the online matching is fairly rudimentary; while it's possible to join a game with your friends, there don't seem to be any kind of clan based features, which I think will mitigate against it's long term appeal if not included fairly soon. It could also do with some sort of persistent player experience matching system - I can see it being an issue very soon if a group of casual players drop into a map against a team who really know what they're doing and where the kinks in new maps are. But other than that it's a highly enjoyable, if at the moment rather shallow, romp through some sort of mad elf civil war. It doesn't take itself seriously at all and encourages you not to either. it is, put simply, fun.
Note there is some controversy on the forums that the US and UK prices of FP are not a straight conversion of each other. I haven't commented on this because, frankly, I don't really care. The issue seems to me to be much more whether FP is value at the price you're expected to pay than what it costs someone thousands of miles away to buy. I'd say at the UK price FP represents good but not brilliant value. It's nowhere near the value of WipEout HD which is a stupendous bargain but it's certainly a lot better value than a lot of DLC that's around on the various platforms and I prefer it to other recent psn based games like BF1943. As always, YMMV. In theory, if you have a US PSN account with some cash in it you could buy it at the cheaper price but there's a possibility that would mean you could only play on the US servers and thus not with your friends. I have no idea if this is the case as I haven't tried it.
Jon
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