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| final impressions by FABIO 09/25/2005, 2:33am PDT | ||||
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| Remember the last level in Katamari Damacy, where you were over 900 meters wide by the end? How at two-thirds in, you pretty much ran out of meaningful stuff to roll up and just tried to scrounge up straggler clouds and islands?
In the last We Love Katamari level, you're once again trying to roll up the whole world, but there's a ton more shit to roll, and you never run out of different types of huge shit to capture. By the end I was at 1100 meters and there was still no sign up things running out. Unfortunately, that's about the only thing WLK does better. All the other levels are mostly just gimmicks: roll the sumo wrestler over food to make him fatter, roll the fireball over things, roll a snowball. The thing that made the original KD so crazy fun was seeing each and every object you had rolled up stuck in a clump together; you had people and birds and all sorts of things struggling around there. In all the gimmick WLK levels, all your ball does is absorb everything and simply get bigger. One level is a flat out bore as you see how many fireflies you can roll up. That's it. You never get big enough to roll up anything but tiny flying insects. The next worst level is where you start off in the sky and have to roll up clouds. All the clouds are just lumped together into one giant mass and you can't pick out individual segments so you just roll around blind hoping you bump into the pieces small enough to roll up. The whole thing is just a crapshoot of whether you'll roll into the smaller pieces early on enough. I lost count of the original opening theme song remixes at around 5. A few others are remixes of other original songs. Another is remixes of a bunch of original song segments thrown together. In total, it seems half the songs in the entire game are just remixes (with two-thirds of those being remixes of just the opening song), all of them horribly lame. Only about 2 songs out of the whole package are decent (but not great). The Vs. mode is a tad better with different size levels to compete on, but it still suffers from the original's problem that since the speed of growing increases exponentially the larger you get, once one player takes a lead, the other has no hope of catching up. There's a co-op mode where each player controls one analog stick (the left or right) and have to coordinate to move around. Like the gimmick levels, it's something different to screw around with, but you'll put it down after a couple tries and go back to some real gameplay. The original Katamari Damacy was meat and potatoes. We Love Katamari is an elegant garnish: nice touch, but you know which one you're going to turn to for sustenance. |
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