iPhone App: i Love Katamari

December 20th, 2008

= 3 stars

i Love Katamari is a goofy game where you roll a tiny ball around a world filled with loose objects. The objects stick to your ball and increase its size until you’re picking up cows, people, buildings and all sorts of ridiculous things. I really enjoyed playing this game on the PlayStation 2 so when I saw the iPhone version, I purchased it right away.

The Good

• Graphic-wise, this is a faithful adaptation. The ball, the myriad of crappy items, daffy music, and even the King and his nonsense dialogue are present.
• The navigation is all done through the iPhone’s position detection, supplemented by hot areas on the screen for fine-tuning. Overall, the set up makes sense — but with complaints noted below.

The Bad

• Severe lags in a few places, namely when the ball hits a point where it increases in size, and when your ball gets trapped somewhere. Probably to conserve frame rate, the forward speed of the ball is limited to where it occasionally becomes frustratingly slow to traverse a wide area.
• At times you have to tilt the iPhone at such an extreme angle that the screen becomes hard to see. The game therefore becomes unintentionally physical, and occasionally frustrating.
• The scale of the game at times feels constrained in the small iPhone space, specifically when there’s an exit off in the distance. This, combined with the lag and extreme iPhone tilt, can often create an uncomfortable, claustrophobic feeling.
• I’m partial to iPhone games that are short and can fit in a small time span. Therefore, the wandering through several menus talking to the retarded King is less appreciated here. I’d prefer to just jump right into some ball-rolling action.

Conclusion

Overall, I feel i Love Katamari was worth the $8 purchase price, but this is surely because I have fond memories of the original. Anybody who hasn’t played Katamari before will likely wind up with their iPhone behind their head, frustrated beyond belief. Here’s hoping there’s a future upgrade to address some of these performance issues. Until then, this is a rather “meh” purchase — download with caution.

iTunes Store Link: