Depending on who you ask, most will say that there isn’t a multiplayer focused game available on the PlayStation 3 that appeals to the masses. Titan Studio’s Fat Princess has been touted as the answer; a game that is easy to pick up, can be enjoyed for any amount of time and one that will still be played long after the initial hype has died down. All I can say is, yes, Fat Prince is that game.

Fat Princess is an interesting take on the Capture The Flag multiplayer option that has existed for such a long time. Rather than trying to capture the flag of your opposing side, your goal here is to rescue your Princess and bring her back to your ’Kingdom’. Unlike Capture The Flag, you can actually make the process of rescuing/re-capturing her significantly more difficult by literally feeding her urges with delicious cakes.

In order to make it challenging, you need to feed the Princess and make her ‘fat’. You see, in Fat Princess, the young lady has taken to loving the sweet and as such, can eat a lot of it. Since you can feed her, she will get bigger, thus making it extremely more difficult to be moved if someone is trying to rescue her. With that, you begin a 16 v 16 conquest at attempting to save her.

There are five character classes in Fat Princess, each with a primary and upgradable attack. Rather than picking your role before you start playing, each one is obtainable by picking up a hat from your castle or on the battlefield. You can switch hats at any time and can even pick up an enemy hat and transform into what they were. The five hat classes, Worker, Mage, Priest, Ranger and Warrior each have their own benefits and everyone can find a function to capitalize on those abilities. Further more, even if you’re not the best at being a brute, you can certainly still be important elsewhere on the battlefield. When playing, I often found myself rather than going on the offensive and attacking the opposing side, spent my time around the base as a Worker doing either repairs, upgrading our units or feeding the princess.

Controls are extremely simple to grasp. You do your attacks with the press of the Square button and targeting with L1. To do a charge attack, you simply hold the attack button until a marker appears under your character. While the charged attack is significantly more effective, it also puts your character at a disadvantage for a moment as they go back to normal. Lastly, once your character has been upgraded, with the press of the Triangle button, you’ll be able to switch your attack weapon.

When Fat Princess was first released there were some serious issues with connecting to games and lag. Depending on when you played the game, it would often take a while for you to connect to potential games or get booted out because a game would fail to connect. The other issue was that once playing, you often experienced some really noticeable lag. It was most prevalent when throwing bombs with the Worker as they would appear a good 1-2 seconds after the action was performed. The severity of the issues really did vary when and where you played. For someone like myself who played the game from the Pacific Time Zone and after midnight, my lag problems were less frequent but I did encounter issues connecting. Issues like this always occur with multiplayer games early on, and gamers have already had another recent release also go through similar issues. Thankfully, Titan Studios has already released a patch to the game that has fixed this issue and now games run really nice and smoothly.

Other than the minor issues that exist with connecting and lag, Fat Princess is yet another title that has proven that Sony needs to make either Headsets a bundled item in all future PS3s or affordable that anyone can purchase one. Fat Princess is a game about communicating and without being able to do that, having fun and affective game is ever so difficult. There are preset comments the characters can say, but these are extremely basic and don’t really do much. If you really want to be affective and enjoy the game at its full potential, you need to talk to your human teammates using a Headset.

Fat Princess uses a really comical art-style in its character designs. There are a lot of cool and varied styles to unlock which can really make your character stand out. The level designs and structure are simple yet work extremely well for an online game. There is never a moment when the environments look out of place and even the animations with the water and lava in some levels look fantastic. On top of that, characters will properly react to getting caught on fire or ice and when being stabbed to death, blood will spurt.

Along with the great art-style, the sound is on par with its effectiveness. The available voice work of the narrator fits the period the game is trying to portray. The canned generic voices are also quite funny and other sound effects work well on many levels. Also, props must be given to Titan for using ‘I like Big Butts’ for the game’s credits. The song fits the game and if you can’t find the humor in it, then someone has stolen your soul.

On top of the standard ‘Rescue the Princess’ mode, you have Team Deathmatch, which has you trying to earn the highest score against your opposition. ‘Invasion’ has you vying to control the majority of Command posts on a map to demoralize your opposition. ‘Snatch N’ Grab’ requires you to capture the other team’s Princess three times to win. All of these modes can be enjoyed on eight of the game’s nine available maps.

Although not a specific mode, the 9th map gives you a whole new experience and one that will be a blast for soccer fans like myself. The Soccer map has the two sides play in very bloody game of the sport. You have a pre-selected amount of time to try to score on the other sides goal and to win the game. You might think it’s fairly simple as there are no Keepers, but everyone can still equip themselves with all the available hats and use their weapons to prevent you from scoring. I really enjoyed playing this but found it hard to find other to play with online.

Fat Princess also contains a single-player portion with two fun and varied experiences. The first is Gladiate which has you take one of the classes and fight off against waves of enemy forces. The other called, Legend of the Fat Princess is the game’s story mode which comically explains the nature of why the Princesses are in love with cake. Gladiate will certainly be a challenge while Legend… is really fun and doesn’t take too long to complete; most people should be able to finish it in about 2 hours and have a smile throughout each of the story’s 7 chapters.