Hard to know what to say about this one.
First of all it's a Katamari game, so it gets a big thumbs up from the start. Same quirky rolling action with lots of stuff to mush up in to a big ball. And it looks lovely and crisp in 720p, loosing a lot of the blurriness and jagged edges of its predecessors.
Plus there's more lunacy from the King of All Cosmos (who's seems to remind me of the video game equivalent of our very own anephric every time he speaks
)
But (and here it comes) it feels slightly wrong in parts.
I loved the original and while We
Katamari Damacy was more of the same it didn't seem to have quite the same quirky and original charm as the first. You could almost tell that Takahashi was struggling with the second game and this one feels even more devoid of it now that he's handed the franchise over to Namco for them to grab it by the udders and milk it dry.
I wasn't a big fan of the world map in We Katamari Damacy and here it seems even worse - quite sluggish to move around and not always obvious where the new stage you've opened up is located. There is a train to catch which is supposed to speed up moving from one segment to another, but it travels around the map independent to you and, as you can spend more time waiting for it to turn up, it's often easier to just toddle around yourself.
There's no story cutscenes in between each level - so no tortured past of the King or wacky adventures of the Hoshino family and it feels like a lesser experience because of it.
There's also some framerate and next-gen slowdown issues which leaves you with the impression that, although it's in HD, it's just lazily using the same engine but tarted up a bit.
That said, there seems to be more cohesion to the level design and areas tend to flow on from one another a little better. The downside being is that you seem to be seeing the same areas over and over again (although you reach new areas as it allows your Katamari to get bigger) which will probably get quite repetitive quite quickly.
The achievements though - what a total disappointment. This game could have had some cracking ones but they seem to be very half arsed and poorly thought out, centering around gift and Cousin collection. The implementation isn't even that good and the main problem is that if you fail a level by not hitting the required Katamari size or other level requirements then you loose everything. It doesn't save anything you've collected and you have to remember their locations and start all over again
Oh and no autosave - given that even accessing the marketplace from the ingame menu causes the game to restart when you close the blade (it does warn you first, but it's still baffling), I can see this causing real problems and loosing a lot of peoples progress if you don't save often.
And on the subject of achievements I have severe reservations about what they've done here. Some of the ones straight out the box seem to require you to have the DLC to get them? I've no problem with that, except they're listed on Major Nelson (not out anywhere but Asia yet) as being 200 MS points each and there's four of them!!!
Sorry Namco, but if you can't even be bothered to at least try and make it look like the player isn't unlocking stuff that is already on the disc, then you can kiss any chance of my money goodbye.
Overall if you've played the other games you'll be questioning if the novelty of online co-op / multiplayer / leaderboards and HD is enough to warrant playing the same game all over again.
To me it feels like they crowbarred the game on to the system and didn't really bother to implement it all the way it should have been with just a bit of forethought (the save system being a perfect example of this).
First time players will no doubt fall for that really quirky kick that everyone else got out of the earlier games, but I'd still recommend they go and try the originals.
First of all it's a Katamari game, so it gets a big thumbs up from the start. Same quirky rolling action with lots of stuff to mush up in to a big ball. And it looks lovely and crisp in 720p, loosing a lot of the blurriness and jagged edges of its predecessors.
Plus there's more lunacy from the King of All Cosmos (who's seems to remind me of the video game equivalent of our very own anephric every time he speaks
)But (and here it comes) it feels slightly wrong in parts.
I loved the original and while We
Katamari Damacy was more of the same it didn't seem to have quite the same quirky and original charm as the first. You could almost tell that Takahashi was struggling with the second game and this one feels even more devoid of it now that he's handed the franchise over to Namco for them to grab it by the udders and milk it dry.I wasn't a big fan of the world map in We
Katamari Damacy and here it seems even worse - quite sluggish to move around and not always obvious where the new stage you've opened up is located. There is a train to catch which is supposed to speed up moving from one segment to another, but it travels around the map independent to you and, as you can spend more time waiting for it to turn up, it's often easier to just toddle around yourself.There's no story cutscenes in between each level - so no tortured past of the King or wacky adventures of the Hoshino family and it feels like a lesser experience because of it.
There's also some framerate and next-gen slowdown issues which leaves you with the impression that, although it's in HD, it's just lazily using the same engine but tarted up a bit.
That said, there seems to be more cohesion to the level design and areas tend to flow on from one another a little better. The downside being is that you seem to be seeing the same areas over and over again (although you reach new areas as it allows your Katamari to get bigger) which will probably get quite repetitive quite quickly.
The achievements though - what a total disappointment. This game could have had some cracking ones but they seem to be very half arsed and poorly thought out, centering around gift and Cousin collection. The implementation isn't even that good and the main problem is that if you fail a level by not hitting the required Katamari size or other level requirements then you loose everything. It doesn't save anything you've collected and you have to remember their locations and start all over again
Oh and no autosave - given that even accessing the marketplace from the ingame menu causes the game to restart when you close the blade (it does warn you first, but it's still baffling), I can see this causing real problems and loosing a lot of peoples progress if you don't save often.
And on the subject of achievements I have severe reservations about what they've done here. Some of the ones straight out the box seem to require you to have the DLC to get them? I've no problem with that, except they're listed on Major Nelson (not out anywhere but Asia yet) as being 200 MS points each and there's four of them!!!
Sorry Namco, but if you can't even be bothered to at least try and make it look like the player isn't unlocking stuff that is already on the disc, then you can kiss any chance of my money goodbye.
Overall if you've played the other games you'll be questioning if the novelty of online co-op / multiplayer / leaderboards and HD is enough to warrant playing the same game all over again.
To me it feels like they crowbarred the game on to the system and didn't really bother to implement it all the way it should have been with just a bit of forethought (the save system being a perfect example of this).
First time players will no doubt fall for that really quirky kick that everyone else got out of the earlier games, but I'd still recommend they go and try the originals.
![[nothing]](./core/customavatars/thumbs/avatar10853_3.gif "[nothing]"){kind=avatar}
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