Fat Princess Adventures Review

While the vibrant and playful icing the franchise is known for still resides atop the Fat Princess Adventures cake, the filling is of a somewhat different flavor. No longer a hectic multiplayer-focused title, Fat Princess Adventures brings pleasantly basic RPG elements to the dish, complete with Diablo style hack-n-slashing and all the loot to collect. The question is, is this new direction a welcome deviation from the norm, especially with such a well-loved franchise?

Oh, This Chestnut Again

It’s business as usual; an evil queen is seeking power over the land and is using her dastardly army of nefarious critters to pull it off. Enter: you. A powerful hero tasked with toppling the tyrannical monarch and saving the day. Although rather by-the-book, it’s a breath of fresh air to experience the silliness of Fat Princess driven by a plot and leaves the experience open to younger audiences while being tasteful enough for the older players.

After you’ve customized your character’s look and personality (the emo dialogues are especially entertaining) you can begin your adventure. As aforementioned, Fat Princess Adventures has a very Diablo look and feel, albeit somewhat more colorful and made all the more humorous thanks to the notorious, tongue in cheek one liners from the narrator. There are copious checkpoints throughout the seven-hour storyline, meaning progression is steady and easy, they also offer the ability to switch class. Fat Princess Adventures offers four classes, each with their own merit and use within the game. Warriors and Engineers are more for the players with a melee disposition while ranged players will find the Mages or Archers more to their taste. There’s no penalty for having a favorite, but it’s worth noting some enemies have weaknesses to specific classes.

Chaotic Baking

Combat can get a little mad at times, what with goblins and cartoon gore filling your screen, so it’s handy each class comes with two types of attack. Hammering Square delivers your basic attack while Triangle is a more defensive move – think sword slash and shield bash respectively. Each of these can be charged for a move powerful attack to help clear the foes, but it’s still rather easy to lose track of your hero amidst the chaos from time to time. A nifty lock-on mechanic works to reduce this, but you’ve often lost a chunk of health before you’ve located your hero anyway. Although simple comes hand in hand with accessible, this does render combat down to a rather bland test of endurance for your thumb, you’ll be hammering Square a hell of a lot.

Thankfully, many of the blighters drop yummy morsels of cake that heal your hero. Better still, chow down on some cake with full health and you’ll turn into an obese toddler variant of your hero for a short while, bringing more devastating punch and stomp moves to the table. Bashing baddies to bits also charges your awesome-meter which, when full, enables you to unleash the rage of the obese toddler all over again. Pickups offer a further method of felling enemies with the likes of bombs and even a shiny object that turns everyone into chickens.

Bag the Loot

Fat Princess Adventures has a basic loot system in place, delivering weapons and armor from chests and such that you can equip your hero with, changing both their appearance and abilities. The fact that Fat Princess Adventures has been developed with four-player co-op in mind becomes even more evident when you notice any discovered items are shared among all players – a nice argument avoider, especially when playing with younger folk. It’s a solid gameplay experience both solo or with three others, but the chaos of combat is amplified greatly in company.

It doesn’t cover any new ground, or do anything of great significance, but Fat Princess Adventures is a solid and playful RPG experience in its own right. It’s a relaxed title that’ll be a sure hit with most, especially if you turn the excessive blood off for your kids. Combat is overly basic and often gets too hectic while the presence of the run-of-the-mill story is more than welcome. It’s a new bake for the Fat Princess franchise, one that’s at least worth a bite.

Fat Princess Adventures reviewed from code provided by the publisher. For information on scoring, please read our Review Policy here.