Katamari Damacy is without a doubt one of my favorite video games of all time, so when I heard that the director of said game; Keita Takahashi was making a new game I got extremely excited. However, after my extremely short lived time with the game, I left incredibly disappointed.
Wattam has you playing as and swapping between a large number of different and colorful characters to goofKatamari Damacy is without a doubt one of my favorite video games of all time, so when I heard that the director of said game; Keita Takahashi was making a new game I got extremely excited. However, after my extremely short lived time with the game, I left incredibly disappointed.
Wattam has you playing as and swapping between a large number of different and colorful characters to goof around and solve ‘puzzles’ with. Most of these characters play exactly the same as one another, with their only distinguishable differences being their appearance. All of the characters you currently have available roam around four different, floating islands the game takes place on, and you will be swapping between them fairly often. While having the four different floating islands to mess around on may seem nice at first glance, they’re actually all pretty much exactly the same in layout, and only one of them changes the terrain to deviate from the completely bland and flat layout of the other islands. Much like the characters, they all feel the same but look different to one another.
The game is kind of structured around a linear level lay-out, but you’re able to do whatever you want during these levels and in-between. ‘Levels’ often consist of a new character(s) appearing and asking the player a request of some kind. Almost every single one of these requests is:
- Finding a specific character and talking to the NPC in question. Characters often move freely around the four different islands when not under player control, which means you have to slowly transport them between islands every time you need them, which gets extremely tedious.
- Using one of the few unique character’s abilities (which always pretty much have no use outside of the requests they’re introduced in)
- Holding hands, running around in circles or stacking characters on top of one another (which has no use outside of these request either)
Every level basically gives you crystal clear instructions, leaving nothing up for interpretation or figuring out. It’s a fetch quest after fetch quest, and it gets old extremely fast. And there is nothing else to do in this game. You finish an easy and boring fetch quest, sit through a long-winded and dull cut scene, and then repeat. There are no interesting areas to explore, not interesting characters to play with, nothing to find or look for, no puzzles, no challenges to overcome, there is nothing. The game prides itself on its colorful cast of characters that you can play as – but you can’t do anything with them. You walk around the small maps and stumble from boring level to boring level. The game tries to create a sense of scale by letting you zoom out the camera and play as large ships of sorts to let you transport your characters from island to island, or even play as the islands themselves – but once you zoom out that far and start moving around you find out that the games universe is not only completely empty, but extremely small as well, ruining any sense of meaningful or impressive scale they were going for.
None of the characters have interesting abilities to mess around with, and are only required for select levels. Very select characters can eat other characters which will then temporarily turn them into either various food items or different coloured turds depending on who you eat and with which character you eat them with. Apart from that none of the other abilities really do that much or have varying effects. The few characters with unique abilities pretty much only exist for very specific mission requirements, and are never required again, like the pillow for example who can make characters fall asleep for a few seconds – what does that do outside of the level it was made for? Nothing. Is it fun or interesting? Absolutely not.
If the game was aiming to appeal to extremely young children, I might lay off it a bit, but from what I can tell this game is aimed at audiences of all ages. And even if it were aimed at children, the game has clunky controls, a pretty significant asking price considering its tiny game length and virtually no post-game content, and a camera I was constantly battling and getting frustrated with. Not to mention the PS4 version has an awful framerate which fluctuated constantly when playing, which is inexcusable considering how simple the graphics are. The only good thing I can say about the game is that the dynamic soundtrack was really nice and relaxing to listen to, I loved the character and overall art design of the game, and the story was cute but simplistic. However, once the cute art style and charm wears off, you are left with what feels like an extremely underdeveloped and lackluster finished product.… Expand
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