Not Sweet Enough | Fat Princess Adventures Review

Long ago, in a time before the PS4, there was a game called Fat Princess. The entire premise was capture-the-flag with two teams trying to steal the other team’s Princess while fattening their own Princess with a cake to make her harder to carry. It was met with a lot of critical praise and was a blast to play. There have been some spin-offs since then, but none that provided the same sense of fulfillment as the original title. Fat Princess Adventures is a spin-off/sequel in a sense of providing a full game, but completely different gameplay.

Fat Princess has always been a quirky game with its cute characters and disgustingly gory content. Fat Princess Adventures is certainly gory with blood and guts spraying everywhere. After a battle, the ground will be littered with broken bodies. I don’t know what it is about cute characters met with a grisly fate, but I have always enjoyed it.

The real gem is the attitude and quirky nature of the game. As a lover of puns, I can fully appreciate how many were thrown around in this game. If it wasn’t a pun there was a good chance the game was poking fun at something else. A quest had me fetch toilet paper and I found it among a bear’s den clearly making fun of Charmin. A quest titled “The Cake is Not a Lie” is clearly addressing Portal and I’m sure there were many more that went over my head. It earned a few chuckles from me. I enjoyed my time more because the world was entertaining from start to finish.

When all summed up Fat Princess Adventures is a Diablo style clone albeit much, much simpler. You and a group of three other people go on an adventure. Slaughtering endlessly and collecting awesome loot to make yourself stronger. There are some sidequests you can take on, but they aren’t anything amazing and usually involve collecting an item. They don’t offer you anything aside from some extra money and not even that much either. This will keep you working on the main quests more than anything else, which is also extremely short.

There are four classes: Wizard, Archer, Warrior, and Engineer. Two long-range classes and two close combat ones. They all have their strength and weakness that you can probably guess already so no need to explain. You can switch whenever you find a checkpoint so you aren’t locked into one for the whole game. It’s useful to switch for certain instances or maybe when someone joins your game so you both aren’t the same character.

I found myself using the Wizard and had fun carrying different elemental staffs. I would switch them based on the enemy’s weakness. I never ran into another Wizard so I always fit right into the random groups I would join. I mostly played my own game and allowed anyone to join in if they wanted to. I had a few people that would come and go after a level, but eventually, two people joined me and never left.

I had a blast playing with these two strangers. We never said a word, but we played through over half the game together. It was an Engineer and an Archer. They were a few levels above me and I soon realized I wasn’t putting out nearly enough damage compared to them. I switched my equipment and staff from power-dealing to cake-dropping.

Keeping with the overall theme of eating cakes in Fat Princess, when you eat a piece of cake you recover some health. My DPS wasn’t close to theirs so with my new equipment I was using I could increase the chance of enemies dropping cake. I made sure my team was constantly fed so we could proceed without trouble. We made a good team and it was the most fun I had with strangers. Naturally, playing with friends on your couch can’t be beat and that makes the mindless slaughter even better. It’s one of those rare games that’s made for couch co-op.

It really is mindless fighting. There may be different enemies with strength and weakness, but the same strategy is implemented for all of them. The levels are small. There may be some extra paths to discover for more loot, but there aren’t hard to find or require much effort. You can replay the campaign on harder difficulties, but aside from getting some new equipment, there isn’t much of a reason.

I had a lot of fun playing Fat Princess Adventures, but it’s too shallow to justify anything more than one or two playthroughs. Unless you are really addicted to finding the best loot, which is primarily based on luck, you will get bored after beating the final boss. I wish the side quests offered great gear or there were some side-bosses that were more challenging with a higher reward. Something to push me more than slaughtering enemies, which is fun for a while, but it does get boring after a while.

The one way Fat Princess Adventures attempts to add replayability is the Grindhouse. It is exactly as it sounds. It’s a mode used to grind. It’s replaying the same main missions but with added challenges for rewards. One challenge may be every player has to be the same character and it switches every 40 seconds.  It does mix up the gameplay and is pretty fun. But, it’s still the same missions over and over. Bottom line: even that gets old.

Fat Princess Adventures is a dumbed down version of Diablo and that’s okay. Honestly, it is. It’s for people who don’t want to invest dozens of hours trying to beat one boss. It’s for people to sit down and have some fun with friends. Every game doesn’t need to have a billion possible hours of playtime. Some games can be a little mindless. I just want to point that out for any hardcore gamers looking for the next big game, because this isn’t it. It’s for casual gamers looking for easy combat and little reward. It’s not reinventing anything and there are games out there that do it better. Still, it’s a fun game with friends. It’s just not really enough to keep me around for long.

This review is based off a review code of the Playstation 4 version of Fat Princess Adventures Developed by Fun Bits Interactive and Provided by Sony Computer Entertainment.