Big Appetite, Little Stomach | Fatty Review

In a sea of limitless mobile games, countless clones arise to try and strike the same gold as their predecessors – rarely succeeding. The mobile game Fatty looks to join the ranks of the addictive runner, but it never really makes it to the level that it aspires for.

If you’ve played an endless runner like Jetpack Joyride, you should be in fairly familiar territory with Fatty. In Fatty, the player must traverse over the terrain as a giant, green blob accompanied by a young, pink girl. There’s no story here, just one simple objective: eat. Yes, it’s literally that simple. Random foods are dispersed throughout the air, and it’s up to you, the player, to guide your green and pink friends to glorious junk food (surrounded by green) while avoiding the evil healthy foods (surrounded by red) .

Now, unlike Jetpack Joyride, where the player simply presses on the screen to ascend and lets go to descend, Fatty mixes the gameplay up by making the player press the touch screen to control fall speed and bounce. This offers a challenge in itself to time bounces right to avoid the hazards (such as the healthy vegetables) that will take away health and break combos. If successful in eating large amounts of junk food, you’ll grow to enormous sizes. While this adds to the combo and your overall score, the weight also makes jumping much slower and harder to time, making the challenge to continue the combo even greater.

Random objects can be found while bouncing across the plains, such as houses and trees which will make you jump higher and enemies to squash to gain extra points. Various missions (again, very reminiscent of Jetpack Joyride) are used to influence actions such as killing certain enemies, destroying houses, and various other tasks. While this is a nice feature to promote further play, it never provided a meta game (such as an overall level) that made performing these tasks even somewhat worthwhile.

The art style of Fatty is charming, and seeing your character almost bursting from the food intake is hilarious. The characters’ animations are great; little things like seeing the girl’s pigtails changing direction when dropping or soaring adds a nice touch. While saying that, the backgrounds of Fatty are fairly simple and add a visual fatigue. Seeing fairly similar backgrounds after prolonged play becomes incredibly tiring and stops the game from having a more dynamic feel.

Fatty has big aspirations to be an addictive endless runner, but small hindrances such as repetitive backgrounds and little longevity hurt its overall value and stops it from becoming something much more special. Great character design and decent gameplay make it a worthwhile experience that many may find a fun time-waster for on-the-go gaming, but better options can be found on the app store.

This review is based off a review copy of the iOS version of Fatty developed by Coatsink Software and distributed by Thumbstar.