We Love Katamari Reroll Review

I played Katamari Damacy Reroll around the time it came out and the more I look back on it, the more I remember it fondly. It's one of the games that I didn't mind you being timed and the last level where you have to roll up so much of the map within the 20 minute timer and then I reached the required roll amount with the main theme playing in the background is one of the most memorable moments in gaming.

I did play Katamari Forever before playing this since I thought We Love Katamari wasn't going to get a modern port at all but it turns out the latter did. Plus the former game was just a "cheap" rare game convention buy.

Introductions out of the way, I found We Love Katamari to be an admirable sequel and it's certainly better than Forever by a large country mile but at the same time, Damacy just felt like those weird wacky one off games that didn't need to be a franchise and while I commend WLK on trying to innovate on the formula, much of it's attempts to innovate doesn't really do much for me.

I do like the gimmick stages and they do seem interesting in concept but so many of them just either consist of you rolling things up until the time limit is up with no mandatory amount you need to roll up leading to a game over or just rolling things until you roll up enough to overtake the bigger object. A lot of these gimmick stages just lack challenge or geniune tension to be engaging for me. It's not as overly difficult as some of Forever's stages but Damacy managed to hit that sweet spot of being having the right amount challenge to the point where the game felt fair but not overly difficult. Once again, the gimmick stages are an admirable attempt at innovation but it further tells me that the original concept of "rolling a certain amount until time runs out" is what makes this kind of gameplay engaging.

In fact, the best and probably the most challenging part of WLK is the Bird and Elephant level where it has Damacy original game mode of rolling up a certain amount before time runs out and much of this map is reused from the final level of the original game just that now you need to 500m rather than 300m. The best parts for me is the non gimmick levels.

This leads to my next issue, the campaign structure, I prefer you increasingly have higher requirements to roll up during the main campaign through a linear stage of missions like say a linear platformer or a 90s fps game rather than you doing the levels out of order. This leads to levels I can skip and inconsistent levels of difficulty. The gimmick stages don't have much in the way of challenge but the traditional stages can be much more challenging by comparison. The Bird and Elephant mission can feel like a massive difficulty spike depending on when the player does it and the game never gets that challenging or stressful again.

Without slowly increasing the roll up requirements and the non linear progression, the difficulty doesn't feel like it is amping up, it's just all over the place.

I might sound like I am being a harsh on WLK and I did enjoy the game and it didn't annoy me as much as Katamari Forever did, the former just further reinforces my belief that Katamari Damacy was a one of a kind game that should've never have became a series. There's only so much you could do with the concept of rolling things up in a ball.