Review: Beautiful Katamari Xbox 360 game

There's a certain beautiful simplicity in the notion of a game that involves rolling a big ball around.

That's the essential working of the Katamari games, from the original Katamari Damacy, through to 2005's We Love Katamari, to the new Beautiful Katamari. The Katamari is the ball your character, the prince of the universe, rolls around. The plot involves the prince's father, the king of the universe, keeps managing to break the universe up into tiny bits.

The Idea is that you, as his loyal son, have to go around and pick them all up. Objects stick to your Katamari as you roll it, and as it gets bigger (as you pick up more objects) you can use it to pick up still larger objects. For instance, you might start a level rolling a small Katamari on a dining table. When the ball gets big enough, you can roll back around the floor and roll up the table itself.

Whether or not this appeals to you very much depends on your sense of humour and need for some kind of realism in games. It's a deeply weird experience the first time you see it, and it's punctuated by deliberately bad attempts at humour on the part of the king.

Controls are fairly simple – you push both analogue sticks to roll around, and there are several tricks such as pushing down on the sticks to spin around. It's very easy to pick up, though, and all part of the game's simplicity. On the PS2 original, the control method worked very well, because both sticks are at the bottom of the joypad.

On the 360 the left stick is in a different position, which makes it a little less natural, but it still works well.
The game is colourful and hugely entertaining, the graphics look spectacular in high-definition and the sound is top-quality Japanese kitsch (as is the whole game, really), but the only real problem is that it's almost exactly the same as the first two games.

There's really not much you can add to the original formula – a few new levels have been added here, such as one where you have to roll up only hot objects – but there's really nothing new. Still, it remains an excellent game, and as this is the only way to roll your Katamari on the Xbox 360, it's highly recommended unless you still have your PS2 and a copy of one of the previous editions.

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