Review: I Love Katamari (iPhone/iPod Touch)

Roughly a week ago, in a surprise move, Namco released an iPhone game based on one of their more recent and creative IPs, that is Katamari Damacy. The official title of the version for Apple's handheld combo is dubbed I Love Katamari.

The basic game mechanic remains unchanged to what fans of the series have come to expect from the various incarnations of the title for the PSP, PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360.

The goal is to roll around a sticky ball, that is a Katamari in the game's lingo, and snowball it to a certain size by rolling over items strewn around in 3D stages.

As you roll around the first level of five for the iPhone title, you quickly realize the nature of the challenge ahead: you can't just roll up objects in any arbitrary order.

Items of a certain size will only be picked up by a Katamari that has reached a respective minimum volume. Thus you are required to iteratively identify objects you can pick up as the monstrosity you are pushing through the level reaches bigger and bigger sizes.

I Love Katamari features four modes which provide for slight variations while keeping the core game mechanic intact. In Story Mode you get a taste of the crazy background of the series, where you are prince to the King of All Cosmos, who requests you to roll up a particular object, varying from stage to stage and involving items such as a dog or a truck.

You start out with a blank Katamari that is just big enough to pick up the smallest items, depending on the stage setting these range from sushi to footballs.

A tight time limit forces you to hurry up and grow your Katamari as fast as possible in order to be able to pick up the requested object. Stages for all playmodes are made available subsequently through successfully completing challenges in story mode.

Once you have cleared a stage it is available in any of the other three modes. Time Attack gives you the opportunity to roll up a Katamari as big as possible within a set time limit, Exact Size Challenge requires you to do exactly that and Eternal Mode is your chance to enjoy stages without having to watch any limitations while building a behemoth to your liking.

The standout feature of the iPhone/iPod Touch version of the game are the controls. Navigation through the leves is accomplished by tilting and turning the device in a very intuitive fashion. To me this feature made me grok the Katamari Damacy fascination for the first time, despite having played the PS2 version for a short while.

From my personal experience I consider the game absolutely suitable for short bursts of playtime. Over the last five days, I have fired up the title every single day in order to try and please the King of all Cosmos while riding the subway or waiting in line.

Unfortunately not all that shines is gold and thanks to frequent slowdowns, occasional sluggishness and control issues every now and then, I Love Katamari makes sure we don't forget.

More than the obvious technical bugs, I am disappointed by sloppy design decisions. For instance, at certain points your Katamari goes through a distinct growth phase - which by the way always causes a slowdown and makes the framerate drop to something around 2-3 fps - where I'd expect to see some kind of consequence to the sudden growth. 

Something along the lines of all of a sudden being able to pick up significantly larger objects than was possible before. That usually doesn't happen though until you've rolled over a couple of more items, that would have already stuck to the Katamari before the growth sequence, which doesn't help to make sense of the whole growth animation/framerate meltdown.

Despite the issues that the game suffers from and which Namco will hopefully address in a future update, my verdict is very positive. This is quite in contrast to the conclusion Luke Plunkett draws in his micro-review on Kotaku and Chris Kohler on his Game|Life blog on Wired.

If you are in for a game that does not mimic the bad half of 80s game concepts - as they seem to be flooding the AppStore - I suggest you grab a copy of I Love Katamari and start nagging Namco to release a patch ASAP - not telling them of course that you already enjoy the game - as I do ;)

Update - Dec. 22nd, 2008: Namco has released an updated version of the game which resolves most of the technical issues I Love Katamari was suffering from. The title in version 1.0.1 plays much smoother now.
The bug fixes also result in a significantly decreased difficulty level. For instance I was trying to get past the Park stage for the last two days, but failed miserably each and every time I attempted to. After the patch, it took me exactly one try to roll up the requested light truck and pass the level.

The UI stayed pretty much unchanged, aside from an element showing the extent of tilt the iPhone/iPod Touch sensor reports to the game. I suggest you either update your version of the game, if you have purchased it already that is, or use the new release to get it in the first place ;)