If you haven’t heard, Beautiful Katamari is the latest oddball Japanese game to hit the shores of Australia. For the uninitiated, ‘katamari’ is the Japanese translation of ‘clump’ but playing a game called Beautiful Clump doesn’t have quite the same appeal. For a game where all you do is roll up giant balls of junk it becomes surprisingly addictive however. If you’re obsessive-compulsive it’s probably a good idea to avoid this game as it might take over you life.

The backstory is that the King of all Cosmos (weird looking dude with a head the shape of a Christmas cracker) has torn a hole in space-time with one of his super tennis serves. The resulting black hole is sucking up the entire universe and it’s down to you, the tiny Prince, to save it. The basic idea is that to restore order to the cosmos you have to roll up katamari’s to replace the moon, the planets, the sun, etc and eventually plug the black hole. On each level you begin with the tiny nucleus of a katamari and begin by rolling up small objects like coins, mice & sushi rolls. As your katamari grows it becomes possible to roll up larger and larger objects like cars, houses, mountains, countries and eventually planets themselves. Most levels don’t require you to grow your katamari this large and instead you are set a time limit and a target size which increases as you progress through the game.

The gameplay itself is simple but challenging. The two thumbsticks are the main control inputs. By simultaneously pushing these in the appropriate directions you can roll your katamari around the environment sucking up objects as you go. There are a couple of subtleties such as the dash and quick-turn but for the most part only thumbs are needed.  Rolling around a giant ball of junk isn’t without challenge however. While your katamari is small, avoiding moving objects and animals is the key but as the katamari gets larger, changing direction becomes more difficult (not that it matters when your katamari’s the size of Australia).

The graphics aren’t particularly impressive but make up for the lack of quality with artistic direction and style. The game is uniquely Japanese with many of the objects, at least on the smaller scales, being specific to Asian culture. Pretty much anything you can imagine can be found and rolled up such as meso-soup, break dancers and Godzilla. The quirky Japanese pop music also adds nicely to the atmosphere of the game but a few of the sound effects can become annoying especially the Kings voice (literally the sound of a turntable being scratched).

Scattered throughout the game are presents which are items you can collect and deck the Prince out in. There are also tiny “Cousins” to be found who you can switch to if you get tired of using the Prince to always roll your katamari. You can check out and read about all the objects you've gathered so once you’ve finished the game you may want to go back and try get a 100% collection too. Without these reasons to replay the levels the game would be quite short. With only about 13 single player and 3 co-op levels the game can be finished within a day or two. There’s also a 2 player vs. mode and online battles but don’t expect to get great mileage out of these.

One extreeeemly annoying thing is the fact that a number of achievements go along the line “Download stages and . . . . The fact that A) you have to download the stages to get these achievements and B) the stages aren’t even available in Australia yet, make this “extra feature” a real disappointment. Frustrating as this is you can’t help but admit that once these stages are available you will almost certainly buy them. Just to make your katamari that little bit bigger (i.e. break the 1,000,000 km barrier)

All up Beautiful Katamari is the kind of game you will either love or find too quirky and short to be worth it. Looking at all of its individual aspects there isn’t much that will really blow you away. Taken as a whole however, the quirky Japanese-ness and the bizarre gameplay add up to make a unique title that everyone should check out and that many will love.