If you’re going to play Fatty, you better be prepared to toss all the good eating habits your mama taught you. Because this chubby fellow’s staple diet is junk food. And your job is to help him find it. As endless runners go, Fatty is rather a slow paced game with not much to do except bounce around collecting food and avoiding obstacles. It sure looks like something the little ones will enjoy playing but for gamers looking for a little more value, Fatty falls short.
In this fairly straightforward game from Coatsink, you play a little girl riding and guiding the little fat green blob to bounce upwards and forwards to pick up coins and junk food that’s strewn around. When you grab ice creams, burgers, pastries, and other yummy stuff, Fatty grows well..er.. fatter and bounces with more vigor. However, starve him off his junk food or feed him nutritious carrots, broccoli, and other vegetables, he promptly turns into a bag of bones and crumbles to the floor. If that’s not cruel enough, you also need to help Fatty complete missions that involve smashing hapless little kitten and bunnies, destroying homes, helicopters and such.
Tap, Hold, Bounce, Yawn!
Your game success is measured by how far you traveled, how many stars you picked up and more importantly how well you fed Fatty. You’ve done well if you made fatty podgy, but not if he is all skin and bones. The game mechanics couldn’t be simpler. Since all Fatty does is bounce, your job is to tap and hold the screen to get the right speed and angles to the bounce. And that’s where things get difficult and frustrating. If you tap and hold Fatty mid-bounce, you’ll get him to bounce faster and higher. On the other hand, if you simply tap on the screen, you will descend quite leisurely. The game’s background also determines the speed and direction of the bounce. If you hit the top of the rolling hills, you’ll go straight up, if you hit the sides, you’ll bounce at a different angle, and if you don’t tap, Fatty will slow down and almost crawl to his death.
Since you cannot determine the trajectory Fatty will follow, the game feels a little out of your control and the best you can do is try and get as big a score as you can before your eventual demise. Once you are reduced to a pile of bones, you start the game all over again and its an endless rinse and repeat mode after that. While there are achievements and missions to pick up, the fun elements in Fatty involve avoiding the suspended red skulls, hitting the hot air balloons, zooming across the skyline, as well as picking up some cool power ups such as goggles, rockets, or super bounces.
The Rough Edges
The colorful backgrounds and soothing music notwithstanding, there’s not enough variety and interactivity to keep the gameplay lively and engaging. Plus, there’s the issue of losing screen quality when Fatty bounces really high, blurring objects and making them impossible to see. If you love power ups, you’ll be disappointed again. There are not too many exciting ones in the Store, and buying them is quite out of reach too. You’ll need 100000 coins for a set of goggles, which means playing for many hours just to pick up that many coins or shelling out some real world currency, which is a shame for a game that’s not free to play. And finally, to top it off, several force close issues (on my HTC Desire X and more such complaints in the Play Store) is sure to leave players feeling pretty deflated.
Overall, Fatty is an endless runner that simply fails to charm both in character and in gameplay. If you love to play bounce-around-the-screen to pick up or avoid items you can hardly see, or like challenging your own high scores, Fatty should keep you in good stead. But with the appalling force close issues I’ve had and a not-so-happy gaming experience, I’d be happy to invest my 69 cents elsewhere.
