The King of all Cosmos and his family are enjoying a nice vacation on one of their favorite planets when they decided to play a game of tennis. The King is a most excellent tennis player and his first serve is so powerful it rips a hole in space. This “black hole” begins to suck up everything it can find: planets, satellites anything is fair game. The King, being totally awesome, uses his powers to close the black hole, but alas the damage has been done. Apparently being the Prince of Cosmos isn’t just made up of easy days on lush planets sipping tropical drinks as the King instructs you to help him restore the cosmos.
This is the background to your role in the new Xbox 360 game Beautiful Katamari and it’s the last time you’ll ever need to know anything about the story. This Reader’s Digest version is the easy way out, as the game will allow you to watch this whole story and numerous other cut scenes should you become a fan of the game’s humor.
If you’ve never played a Katamari game the premise is simple, as the Prince of Cosmos you start to roll things up into a ball. These balls, or Katamaris, start to grow as you roll over objects. The only catch is you can’t roll items up that are bigger then your Katamari, of course as your ball grows the items you can roll up become larger until eventually you’ll be rolling up parts of the planet.
Control is handled by using the analog sticks and can take some getting used to. Pushing both sticks up rolls you forward, pull them down and you roll back, alternating the sticks makes you do quick slide turns and so on. Of course momentum plays a small role in the movement of your Katamari as well. While the control system itself is simple, it can get frustrating. It’s not very intuitive.
Most of your game time is going to be spent going on missions to roll up Katamari’s. The missions vary—for example the King might thinks it’s a good idea to have some drinks so you’ll be put into a shop where you get some extra bonus for rolling up things like soda cans and water bottles. Each mission has a time limit and your job is to make as big a Katamari as possible in that time frame. After you’re done the King evaluates your job, usually with some snide comment in return and then you get a score. Then it’s off to roll up more stuff.
The environments are certainly quirky to say the least and the objects you can roll up are hysterical at times. The graphics while passable are certainly not worthy of any next gen system. The soundtrack is probably the most bizarre aspect of and already bizarre game. I’m not even sure how to classify it; maybe Japanese Pop meets jazz and rock? As bad as that sounds, the lyrics of some of the songs are simply going to get stuck in your head.
Beautiful Katamari also offers some multiplayer options in the form of co-op and versus modes. You can play co-op offline only on a single 360. Co-op is odd as the two of you control the same Katamari, one the left side and the other the right. If you’ve ever wanted to test the marital bonds, then Katamari’s co-op mode is for you. Versus mode is available both on Live and offline, and it’s pretty straight forward stuff. You’re both dropped into one of the environments and tasked with collecting as many of a certain items as possible. While neither of these modes is terrible, they certainly aren’t pushing the envelope.
There are some little extras tacked into the game that all feel out of place such as the ability to take photos of your work and also look at things you have rolled up. I’m not sure what purpose these serve to the game itself.
