Official Score
Overall - 30%
30%
Although Fantom Feast follows in the same footsteps as the Katamari Damacy series, the roughshod execution makes it a hard pass for even the most diehard of fans.
Players must eat their foes and become the biggest ghost to ever live in prettysmart games’ new title Fantom Feast. Taking liberal notes from Bandai Namco’s Katamari Damacy series, should you make a meal out of this title?
Fantom Feast Review
The star of Fantom Feast, a hungry ghost named Fantom, is a funny fellow. He has branches for horns, two stubbly little arms, and eyes the size of saucers. He has one goal in life – to eat as much as he can and grow in absolute mass. There’s a catch though – he can only eat creatures that are smaller than him. Try to take a bite out of somebody of a larger stature and it’s literally game over. Each time Fantom eats a creature, he becomes ever so slightly bigger. The key is to eat the smaller fry and slowly move your way up until you take over the majority of the screen.
This sounds like a solid enough concept, one that has been done elsewhere. However, there are a number of flaws in its design that make things absolutely aggravating. One cardinal sin comes in its handling – Fantom cannot stop on a dime, and instead floats around for a brief period when changing direction. It often feels like the player is skidding, and when the screen is full of enemies, it can be hard to come out unscathed.
This is compounded when some of the different effects come into play. Your garden variety mook just floats from one side of the screen to the other, but later areas have laser-spewing creatures that cut a clear path through almost everything, wind that changes your direction, drops that decrease your size, and darkness that hides almost everything outside your immediate vicinity. It comes across as gimmicky, and can be downright frustrating at times. Players can mitigate a single hit with the shield power-up or improve their handling by charging their Supercharge meter, but this quickly proves to be a Band-Aid on a festering wound.
It’s not like there is much to the game either. Those that manage to satiate Fantom’s appetite will see him shrink back to his original form, albeit with a new flower on his horn. Repeat this until death comes knocking on your doorstep, and players will know what to expect before too long. Needless to say, it proves to be a fairly repetitive title that offers little in the way of variety.
This is exacerbated when paired with its amateur aesthetics. There is almost no animation to speak of – sprites lack emotion, worlds lack character, and even Fantom’s thoughts look to be lost to the void. The sound design does not fare much better, with the entirety of the game composed of tracks and samples from freesound.org and incompetech.com.
Although Fantom Feast follows in the same footsteps as the Katamari Damacy series, the roughshod execution makes it a hard pass for even the most diehard of fans.
