Beautiful Katamari Review

Beautiful Katamari is the fourth game in the Katamari series, and is the debut for the franchise on the Xbox 360. Despite being the fourth in series, it’s only the second of the Katamari games to be released in the UK, which, due to an amazing lack of foresight, is where I happen to live. I could have played the second one, We Love Katamari, but apparently actual physical copies of it are as rare as pickled unicorn.

There’s something I want to get off my chest before I go any further; Beautiful Katamari is short. Not eight hours short like Call of Duty 4, I mean as short as a stunted hobbit. If you’re any good at Katamari games, then it’s about the same length as Portal, a couple of hours, which would be fine if it wasn’t three times the bloody price. That’s not to say that the game is utterly without merit, far from it. I had a lot of fun playing it, it’s just the fun didn’t last very long.

For those of you who don’t know, Beautiful Katamari is all about rolling around a small sticky ball, picking up random bits of detritus until the ball reaches a certain size, at which point the so-called “King of all Cosmos” descends from on high and judges your efforts using the some arcane formula that is as inscrutable as the instructions that come with IKEA furniture. As your Katamari grows in size you can pick up increasing large objects, until you’re picking up things like the Great Wall of China and Belgium.

There’s a definite degree of satisfaction in doing well at Beautiful Katamari and this works in the game’s favour as there isn’t really anything else to do. A couple of the levels try to mix it up a little bit, but ultimately it’s the same thing with a slightly different scoring system.

Visually, Beautiful Katamari has its proverbial shit together, set as it is in an ultra-stylised version of Earth populated by the most untidy people in the universe. This is a good thing for a couple reasons: firstly, it means that that game looks different from pretty much everything on the 360 at the moment, and secondly, it means that there can be a lot of things on screen without the hardware having a fit. Beautiful Katamari takes what would normally be a liability, the need for low polygon counts, and makes it into a part of the experience. The audio is a little bit more difficult to recommend however. I like it a lot, but my tolerance for odd Japanese pop and lounge music is pretty high and it’s not hard to imagine it getting annoying very quickly.

It’s not all chocolate and kittens though, as the game has some truly infuriating elements. Firstly, as I mentioned before, it’s fucking short. I played through the entire single player ‘campaign’ in about two hours and a sizeable portion of that was spent dicking around listening to the King. In fact, the King is the source of most of the things that make the game frustrating. His dialogue is supposed to be humorous, but after the first few exchanges, it begins to get irritating, after a few more, you just skip it. It doesn’t help that it’s accompanied by a weird scratchy sound that is like nails on a blackboard.

He’s also a twat.

To qualify that statement a little more, at the end of each of the levels you have to report back to the King. As I mentioned earlier, he has some arcane formula that he uses to judge the worth of your Katamari and then he assigns a point total. As far as I can see, the highest score you can get for a Katamari is 100, but a score of 75 is ordinary and you are criticised for it. Now, I am not a game designer, but I would have thought that berating a player for what is a pretty good score is not a good way to keep them playing. Then again, I suppose they don’t care. After all, you’ve already paid, haven’t you?

The multi-player options in this game are a joke. They have a tacked on feel that isn’t even subtle. The co-op mode would be great fun if it allowed you and a friend to play through the game as a team, but it doesn’t do that. Instead you get three short levels that even a novice can complete first time. The versus multiplayer, while an amusing distraction, doesn’t have enough legs to hold your attention for long, and I doubt that the Xbox Live community will care.

In conclusion, it’s very hard to recommend buying Beautiful Katamari. It’s too short and its replay value is very dependent on how much you like rolling up crap and how much you like competing with the frankly frightening people that populate the leader boards. On the other hand, it IS fun, especially if you’re new to the franchise. Basically, this is one to rent, rather than buy.