Fatty Review

Developer: Coatsink Software
Price: $0.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Device Reviewed On: iPhone 5

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What was going through Coatsink Software's collective mind when the studio made Fatty? Why is there a girl riding a giant green bouncing blob named Fatty who must eat and eat, avoiding veggies to the point of death? I don't know, the game doesn't make a big deal of it, so the why of Fatty will remain a mystery. It's at least an entertaining endless game, though one in need of visual upgrades.

Players must bounce Fatty through the rolling hills, taking care so as to bounce off the side of the hill to keep going forward. Fatty must eat fatty food (easily distinguished with a green aura, ironically enough) to get fatter to bounce higher and stay alive. The vegetables, demarcated with a red aura, make Fatty get skinnier, which in this case is bad, and it’s especially bad because if he eats too many vegetables he gets so skinny that his skin melts away. It’s rather horrifying.

Perhaps this is an anti-anorexia metaphor?

Players can bounce Fatty on the ground by tapping on the screen, and this is where the game gets too clever for its own good. Tapping on the left side of the screen will cause Fatty to bounce more straight downward. Tapping on the right side causes Fatty to bounce to the right. I discovered this by talking to one of the developers on The Portable Podcast. It’s never really explained in the game, which is a shame because it’s a rather ingenious control scheme.

The action makes it easy to get in to that trance state that the great endless games succeed at, though the end of a run tends to be a bit of a slog as Fatty wilts away, and players are struggling to fight for that one last piece of fatty food to keep going. There are powerups collected in the game, and with items that can be purchased with coins to add to one’s collection to start off with, but they’re not really necessary, and rather expensive to boot. At least the Super Bounce is affordable, but the 5X multiplier requires an insanely good run in order to make up for its 15,000 coin cost. The rest, such as unlimited jet pack and ground sliding, pretty much require IAP to unlock. Still, it’s all thankfully avoidable entirely.

Now, bizarrely, the game doesn’t seem to be quite, well, modern. The game doesn’t run in widescreen at all, it runs windowed. Even on Android devices, where aspect ratios roam wide and free like the buffalo, this is the case, so it’s not just unoptimized for iPhone 5, it’s actually built that way entirely. As well, the artwork seems a bit blurry – it’s 2013, Retina or die!

Fatty certainly amused me long enough to be worth my time and left me playing it for reasons more than “I’m reviewing this,” which is quite the good thing, but the game could use quite the visual upgrade.