You gotta have big balls
So, I’ve mentioned that the idea is rolling and, to be honest, that’s pretty much it. Yep, all you do is roll stuff up into a big ball. But, like the best games, a simple premise doesn’t mean a simple game, as anyone who plays Othello will tell you. At the start of each level, depending on the size of your Katamari, you can only roll certain things up. So say you start off with a 1m diameter Katamari, you can only roll up stuff roughly half that size… but as you go around collecting smaller objects, this increases the size of your Katamari, so you can collect bigger objects… which again increase the size of your Katamari and so on until you can roll up the Houses of Parliament, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty in one hit before moving on to the entire island New York sits on!
Not every game involves you rolling a Katamari of such immense proportions and this is where the “easy to learn, hard to master” part of the game comes in. Control is almost exclusively through the two joysticks, each representing a hand on your character. The effect is very similar to driving a tank, so push both forward to go forwards, angle both to the right to do a long right turn and push one forward and one back to do a sharp turn. There’s a few other moves but that’s it in the main so you’ll be up and rolling in seconds.
The tricky bit, and where the skill comes in, is in manoeuvring effectively to collect the right bits and bobs. Try for something too large and you’ll come to a sudden stop, losing momentum and time. Dotted around each level are several large obstacles which, if you hit too hard whilst you’re too small, you’ll lose some valuable items off your Katamari.
Many of the levels are played against a time limit with you having to roll a Katamari to a certain size in that limit. For a variation there are levels where you just have to get the Katamari to a certain size as fast as possible. Also thrown in are fairly challenging levels where you have to guess how big the Katamari is and stop rolling when you think you’re at the right size along with other levels where you have to build as big a Katamari as you can before hitting a particular type of item, which will be in numerous quantities all over the level, just to make things tricky.
