Amazing Katamari Damacy
Amazing Katamari Damacy is a score-based runner. While the genre has been done to death by now, there's still room for innovation and excellence, especially if you are true to the property that the game represents (*cries in Spider-Man Unlimited*). This game could've been pretty neat, focusing on something like rebuilding constellations with your katamari that ties into the main series while remaining somewhat unique, but it does nothing of the sort. Instead, the designers opted for a generic endless runner, with only the aesthetics and the most basic interpretation of katamari rolling to bank on popular recognition.
While you are running with your katamari, you should be picking up all kinds of things in order to grow in size, while avoiding mini black holes and anything too large to roll up. As you do so, you'll periodically reach size milestones that expand the play space and the list of objects that can be rolled up. You can also recruit the help of the Prince's cousins by rolling them up, each acting like a different kind of power-up. Eventually, each run reaches a point there'll be no room left for the katamari to grow, signified by crossing onto the King of All Cosmos' rainbow bridge. This is where Amazing Katamari Damacy really fell apart for me.
The rainbow bridge never grows or changes the way the rest of the game's locations do, and it has a serious problem with virtually unavoidable obstacles (looking at you, oversized chess rook). This colorful closing segment really hammers in the fact that this is a game about points, not progress. Everything you do, every upgrade for the cousins, every free-to-play mechanic you buy into, it's all just to get the numbers higher. I'm just not driven by that kind of thing though, especially not in a series like Katamari Damacy that has already shown there is so much more it can do.
With it not being available anymore, I can't really say whether or not it's worth downloading this game. What I can say though is that it definitely lost sight of what made the series special. When considering its visual and audio design alone, it looks like it fits in with the rest of the franchise, but once you actually start to play it, it becomes clear that this is a knockoff runner game with a Katamari Damacy coat of paint. I'm not sad that I played it, but it could have been so much more, and I'm disappointed that it wasn't. Hopefully, the next attempt at an original Katamari game is given the room it needs to really come into its own.
