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Once thought to be mythical, the 32-player Capture-the-Fat game Fat Princess finally arrived on the PlayStation Store last week. With a $15 price tag, it stands as one of the more expensive PSN offerings… and with the recent news of terrible connectivity issues, you may be wondering if the game is worth your money. After spinning through the lackluster single-player campaign – which is really just a tutorial that overstays its welcome – and several hours of online multiplayer, I am here to report that while Fat Princess may not seem like a deal at $15, it sure is a ton of fun. Let’s do this without any weight puns.

Fat Princess is an effort to take a decade’s worth of first-person shooter buzzwords and apply them to a cute third-person cartoon environment. Class-based. Capture the flag. Voice chat. Online multiplayer. Stats tracking. The Princess has all of that, and if you think those terms have been left out in the sun too long when applied to FPS games, Fat Princess makes them all feel fresh again. In an online match, you will be on one of two teams. For the basic gameplay mode, your goal is to rescue your princess while making sure the enemy princess stays stuck in your dungeon. Other modes grant the win to the team who can occupy the most towers, or by rescuing the princess several times… and there’s even a surprise soccer mode that I haven’t seen anybody talk about. You begin each match (and indeed, every time you respawn in) as a simple classless villager. Deciding which class you prefer – Warrior, Ranger, Priest, Mage or Worker – is as easy as picking up a new hat. Since the hat mechanic is built into the live game, not determined before the match begins, you can change classes during the battle as often as you like.

The five classes come with their own strengths and weaknesses and therefore align themselves along different responsibilities during the fight. They vary according to health, speed and weaponry. The Warrior has strong weapons and a great life bar, but runs fairly slowly. The Priest can easily heal other units but his own life bar is skimpy. You get it. The fun part is being able to quickly change your identity and try out a different view of the battlefield.

The Worker, for example, is an absolute necessity for the first half of any match. Although being a Worker may dredge up horrible memories of the expendable lives of the peons of WarCraft, in Fat Princess they get a much better deal. Initially, Workers are tasked with the first line of defense: building the castle doors (which swing open for your team but bar out all else) and collecting nearby resources. Chopping trees and mining stone (ore? metal? crystals? The imagery is unclear) will allow the team to upgrade all the classes to an advanced state… meaning better weapons and more abilities for your dudes. Workers can also build siege equipment (ladders, bounce pads, catapults) at predetermined locations on the map. Even once the castle is more or less fully upgraded, Workers can still be of use as their axe can do damage, and the upgraded worker gets to carry bombs.

But the fun part lies in the split-second decision to change classes. I’ll usually start off as a Worker and hustle logs and stone around the map. Then I’ll flirt with being a Ranger for a while, because I like sniping guys with arrows. If I’m playing single-player, eventually I’ll end it as a Warrior and make a run for the princess, since he has the longest life bar. In this way, you can switch at your whim between playing as a passive defender or as a full-aggro killer. As somebody who has long since passed his prime FPS days, I really appreciate and enjoy being able to enter a Fat Princess match knowing that I can tailor the experience on the fly.

The fat part comes into play as a silly way to make things more difficult for the opposing team. With their princess locked up in your dungeon, any class can feed her cake to make her fat. The princesses have several levels of obesity, with each level making it harder and slower to ferry them back to base. Cake spawns all over the map, so in every game players need to pick it up and stuff her face. With an eye on the prisoner’s weight, your team can avoid making the inevitable rescue mission too easy for the enemy.

Obviously a person’s weight can be a sensitive subject, and I could understand someone feeling uncomfortable with the game’s title and obese women premise. The only thing I can offer is that the game does not make that huge a deal about the ladies being fat (no, they are not the only women in the game; your player character can be customized to be female). In fact, you’re quickly taught to value having a fat imprisoned princess. But it’s not like the game is peppered with fat jokes.

The game is stacked with internet jokes, however. For example, one of the randomized bot names in Pwnan, and the play-by-play announcer will occasionally yell “They’re in our base, killing our dudes!”

Fat Princess games have no artificial timer. While the lack of a timer can make the single-player campaign mode drag on interminably, it is nice to play a game without a ticking clock in the background. Setting the bots to easy and playing a single-player skirmish is a great way to get accustomed to the game’s mechanics (or fully explore one of the six or seven available maps; they are full of secrets) without being interrupted by a sudden GAME OVER after 20 minutes.

In a nice touch, there’s a violence slider that switches from blood-and-gore to just blood to neither, making the game no more inappropriate for kids than a Tom and Jerry cartoon. My four-year-old son has mastered the controls well enough that he can reliably win when positioned inside an easy single-player offline match with 31 bots.

Your character can be customized using almost 100 parts… eye color, hair, beard, etc. These elements are unlocked simply by playing, whether you play online or offline.

There is no local multiplayer option. I could have used a 2-man splitscreen option, or even 4-man with a linked camera a la LittleBigPlanet. But sadly, local offline play in single-player only. In addition to being able to set up local single-player skirmishes with bots, there is also a Gladiate mode with puts you in an arena with the goal of defeating waves of enemies. If you watch the game’s credits, you get to slice through enemies while Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “I Like Big Butts” song plays. There is a menu option that indicates future DLC is on the way. Given the relatively high price, it would be nice if we could get a content update or two for free.

Developer Titan Studios knows that the online portion has problems, and they have promised a patch to address the lag and connection issues. Until that arrives, it will continue to be difficult to get into an online match. What usually happens for me is that the game tries to connect but then fails at the last step and dumps back to the main menu. It takes at least two minutes to roll through this failure. It is frustrating and could have the same unfortunate result as what happened to Castle Crashers on Xbox 360… by the time the patch arrives, everyone has already left the game.

Assuming that they get the online mode reliable, I have no problem giving Fat Princess a 4 out of 5. I have already put over ten hours into it and I consider the $15 well-spent. But if Titan can’t act quickly, Fat Princess will fall off the map.

For hilarious, chaotic-yet-accessible gameplay, but lacking local multiplayer… Fat Princess on PS3 gets 4 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

Fat Princess was released July 2009 (NA) on PlayStation Network. Rated T

Check out Fat Princess and other PS3 reviews at Test Freaks.