The matches -- pitting the people playing on the three TVs against each other and 29 bots -- was taking place on the same map I has seen at E3 called Black Forest, but even so, it was cool to see how far the game had come. To begin with everything was brighter and cleaner. Now, the game looked good before, but now there's just a slick feel to it as the gears and pipes of the hat-producing machines flutter on the screen and as your team storms the gates of an opposing enemy castle.


Got wood?
Still, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. See, there are five classes in Fat Princess, but you don't need to choose what you want to be before you set out in a match. In your base, a multi-tiered castle with plenty of defenses and a holding cell for your female prisoner, you'll find several machines pumping out caps for your men. When you pick one of these distinctive hats up, you take that class for as long as you survivor or until you grab another piece of headwear. Now, each of these caps comes with its own set of benefits. When you pick up the horned cowl of a warrior, you'll get a six-heart life bar, gnarly sword, and shield to protect yourself from incoming attacks. Choose to be a heavenly cleric, and you can heal you allies. Pick up a villager hat, and you can chop down trees and mine metal so that you can upgrade your base.

My gameplay demo actually focused a lot on this upgrading ability -- which is something I had never seen in this amount of detail. While jogging around the eye-popping green ground and clear blue stream, your villager can pick up the aforementioned wood and metal and you'll see those resource totals grow in a top-right, onscreen meter. Back at base, you'll come across little spots with padlocks on them. These icons signify that you can work some building magic on the spot and create or improve what is already there. See, sometimes building will be as easy as creating a seesaw catapult that can rocket your men across the map into the enemy's base, but other times you'll be able to upgrade the machines that are pumping out class caps. Each class has three levels of use and each comes with power-ups that will change the face of the game.

While the resource-gathering villagers might not be something to fear at Level 1 (they can only slap opponents), they'll be able to toss out explosives once you level that particular machine up. The warriors and their swords are nothing to mess with in any arena, but once their devices start spitting out upgraded hats, they'll be able to wield a glaive so that they can slice through the competition in a full-on run. Upgrade you're ranger (see: archer), and you'll get a sweet-looking musket.

Even as you're adding in these levels and changes, Fat Princess seems like it's going to be simple enough for anyone to jump into. You can charge an attack by holding Square (you can run while doing this), L1 will lock onto enemies and give you a short and sweet health summary (green hearts with smiling faces are good to go; yellow hearts with a plain face are damaged; and red, sad-face hearts are on death's door), and R1 allows you to strafe across the map.

Aside from getting to play the game, the lounge actually gave me the chance to goof around with the game's menus and setup. First off, the whole thing is stylized in this cartoon motif so that when you check out the tutorial section you're paging through this storybook, but beyond that, the entire setup has a very tongue-in-cheek. Leaderboards are under "Bragging Rights," options are "Twiddly Knobs," and your personal statistics -- all 15 pages that document things from the number of games played to multiplayer stuns to single-player fire power-up kills -- are termed "Why I'm Awesome."


The characters in Fat Princess are simple guys to fit the simple environment, but you're welcome to fool with your character as you see fit. Under the "Get Fabulous" option, I was able to change skin color, make my eyes go from green to blue to brown, and modify what kind of facial hair my guy was rocking. Pigtails and mullets are possible for hairstyles, but I stumbled upon the "baldy" option and the ghostly white skin and something tells me you're going to see a lot of Kratos clans running around this game.

Fat Princess is set for a summer release and should launch with six maps. Personally, I can't wait. I dig that you score points for killing bad guys but also for committing to your role of villager and upgrading the hat machines, the game's a breeze to jump into and a blast to play -- nothing says fun like decapitating your friends and watching their blood gush across an Animal Crossing-like world -- and I can see me putting a lot of online hours into this one.