I read a recent email from Sony which told me that Fat Princess: Piece of Cake was closing down its servers at the start of next year. This was bad news, since Fat Princess is a game series I always liked the sound of, and I wanted to try it out - and a free version of the game is a good way to do so.
So I resolved to download it, but that meant finding my Vita, hoping it still held a charge, registering a new device password on Sony's 2FA system, and so on. It all worked, amazingly. I loaded up the game, ready to carry the fat princess around, to find that things weren't as I was expecting.
This isn't a strategy game or a platform game or anything like I believed Fat Princess to be. This is a match-three game, with microtransactions all over the place and a slow learning curve.
But you know, it's actually a really good match-three game. There's a lot of strategy in choosing which gems you are matching - choose red to make the swordsman hit one member of the opposing front row, yellow for the musket to shoot the entire front row (with lower damage), orange to drop a bomb on the first two rows, blue to restore health, purple to power up the princess (who acts like a smart bomb), and green to collect gems to upgrade your characters.
Get four in a row and you get an extra turn, and a sparkly gem which turns all surrounding gems the same colour when matched. Get five in a row and you get a wildcard which erases all of a particular type. Create combos (or 'cascades') and moves follow each other.
There have been a couple of tricky levels so far, normally with overpowered bosses, but I'm made my way through Cake Cove and ave completed the weekly levels a few times. I will probably come back to this from time to time ... but probably won't spend money on it.
And I still need to try Fat Princess.
So I resolved to download it, but that meant finding my Vita, hoping it still held a charge, registering a new device password on Sony's 2FA system, and so on. It all worked, amazingly. I loaded up the game, ready to carry the fat princess around, to find that things weren't as I was expecting.
This isn't a strategy game or a platform game or anything like I believed Fat Princess to be. This is a match-three game, with microtransactions all over the place and a slow learning curve.
But you know, it's actually a really good match-three game. There's a lot of strategy in choosing which gems you are matching - choose red to make the swordsman hit one member of the opposing front row, yellow for the musket to shoot the entire front row (with lower damage), orange to drop a bomb on the first two rows, blue to restore health, purple to power up the princess (who acts like a smart bomb), and green to collect gems to upgrade your characters.
Get four in a row and you get an extra turn, and a sparkly gem which turns all surrounding gems the same colour when matched. Get five in a row and you get a wildcard which erases all of a particular type. Create combos (or 'cascades') and moves follow each other.
There have been a couple of tricky levels so far, normally with overpowered bosses, but I'm made my way through Cake Cove and ave completed the weekly levels a few times. I will probably come back to this from time to time ... but probably won't spend money on it.
And I still need to try Fat Princess.
