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Beautiful Katamari
Platform: Xbox 360
More of the same with an online mode that doesn't add anything
Review by Sirus
Beautiful Katamari is the fourth katamari game to be released, the third on consoles, and the first on the Xbox 360. The objective here is the same as in all the previous games. You are the prince of the cosmos and, by some strange mishap, the universe is destroyed and you are tasked with restoring the universe all on your lonesome. You are given a strange ball called a katamari at the beginning of each level that you use to roll stuff up. As you gather more stuff that miraculously sticks to your blob of junk, your blob gets bigger and bigger until you can roll up people instead of just random knick knacks sitting around the levels.
All levels give you an objective, usually to get your blob to a certain size, and usually you have a time limit in which to reach that objective. When time runs out, you are given a score based on how well you did reaching your goal. Of course simply reaching goals isn’t good enough for the King of the Cosmos. Doing so will give you a low rating and a verbal attack. Most of the good scores are so annoyingly hard to get that most gamers will find themselves content simply passing the minimum requirements and going on to the next level.
All levels have presents and cousins hidden in various places to entice the completionist to play for much longer than the bare minimum. The presents don’t serve any real practical purpose and simply make your character look even sillier than they already do when you equip them. Cousins are alternate characters you can control instead of the Prince but once again they are purely cosmetic so only hardcore completionists really are going to care.
The graphics in Beautiful Katamari could be confused by some as graphics from the previous PS2 games. They use the same simple shapes with low polygon counts that have been used in the previous games. On the Xbox 360, the game does have few loading times within each level you play and very little slowdown. There are still loading times at the beginning of each level though which can get annoying quite fast. The sound effects in the game are all reused from previous games and the music is all reused from We Love Katamari including the songs that I couldn’t stand then. The only saving grace is the ability to play any level with custom soundtracks, thanks to the game being on Xbox 360, but I really wish they had some new songs up to the quality of the first game.
The game takes about four hours to beat if you do the bare minimum on each level. There is an online mode as well as the same versus and co-op modes that were in We Love Katamari. The online isn’t much different from the versus mode in We Love Katamari other than letting you play without split-screen. The versus battles themselves still aren’t very much fun and boil down to wandering a level scattered with a bunch of the same type of item and trying to get the most of that item of anyone in the playing field.
Online mode allows you to lock onto your adversaries but it doesn’t work as well as it should and, as before, you can hardly ever hit them. If you are a compulsive completionist who felt the need to gather all the presents and cousins in the previous games on PS2 and/or PSP and you are in need of a katamari fix then you might get a decent amount of mileage from Beautiful Katamari. Everyone else would be better off renting it if they are interested in seeing how it feels on the 360, even if it's just to play through the last level with its extreme size requirement.
Platform: Xbox 360
More of the same with an online mode that doesn't add anything
Review by Sirus
Beautiful Katamari is the fourth katamari game to be released, the third on consoles, and the first on the Xbox 360. The objective here is the same as in all the previous games. You are the prince of the cosmos and, by some strange mishap, the universe is destroyed and you are tasked with restoring the universe all on your lonesome. You are given a strange ball called a katamari at the beginning of each level that you use to roll stuff up. As you gather more stuff that miraculously sticks to your blob of junk, your blob gets bigger and bigger until you can roll up people instead of just random knick knacks sitting around the levels.
All levels give you an objective, usually to get your blob to a certain size, and usually you have a time limit in which to reach that objective. When time runs out, you are given a score based on how well you did reaching your goal. Of course simply reaching goals isn’t good enough for the King of the Cosmos. Doing so will give you a low rating and a verbal attack. Most of the good scores are so annoyingly hard to get that most gamers will find themselves content simply passing the minimum requirements and going on to the next level.
All levels have presents and cousins hidden in various places to entice the completionist to play for much longer than the bare minimum. The presents don’t serve any real practical purpose and simply make your character look even sillier than they already do when you equip them. Cousins are alternate characters you can control instead of the Prince but once again they are purely cosmetic so only hardcore completionists really are going to care.
The graphics in Beautiful Katamari could be confused by some as graphics from the previous PS2 games. They use the same simple shapes with low polygon counts that have been used in the previous games. On the Xbox 360, the game does have few loading times within each level you play and very little slowdown. There are still loading times at the beginning of each level though which can get annoying quite fast. The sound effects in the game are all reused from previous games and the music is all reused from We Love Katamari including the songs that I couldn’t stand then. The only saving grace is the ability to play any level with custom soundtracks, thanks to the game being on Xbox 360, but I really wish they had some new songs up to the quality of the first game.
The game takes about four hours to beat if you do the bare minimum on each level. There is an online mode as well as the same versus and co-op modes that were in We Love Katamari. The online isn’t much different from the versus mode in We Love Katamari other than letting you play without split-screen. The versus battles themselves still aren’t very much fun and boil down to wandering a level scattered with a bunch of the same type of item and trying to get the most of that item of anyone in the playing field.
Online mode allows you to lock onto your adversaries but it doesn’t work as well as it should and, as before, you can hardly ever hit them. If you are a compulsive completionist who felt the need to gather all the presents and cousins in the previous games on PS2 and/or PSP and you are in need of a katamari fix then you might get a decent amount of mileage from Beautiful Katamari. Everyone else would be better off renting it if they are interested in seeing how it feels on the 360, even if it's just to play through the last level with its extreme size requirement.
| 7/10 - Same katamari gameplay we know and love. | ||||||
| 6/10 - Same katamari graphics we know and love since the first game. | ||||||
| 5/10 - Same music I hated in We Love Katamari w/ custom soundtracks. | ||||||
| 6/10 - Strange stage select screen that is mostly annoying. | ||||||
| 4/10 -Single player that's over in 4 hours, and lame online. | ||||||
| 5.5/10 (Mediocre) | ||||||
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