Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake is exactly what you’d think it is – a scaled down version of the PSN release with the same pick-up-and-play mentality, hats that define your role on the battlefield, and flags that get bigger when you force-feed them cake. 

Fistful of Cake feels just like its console big brother, and that’s a good thing. The PSN original is great fun, and it translates well to the PSP. Every game mode is a variant of capture the flag, but that’s what you get when you change the flag into a princess and then name your game after it. Since your flag gets bigger when you feed it there are more ways to work as a team than in your run-of-the-mill capture the flag game. Offense doesn’t just involve killing the opposing team’s offense but getting rid of their cake-carriers, and defense has the addition of finding cake and feeding it to your princess. In some game modes you’ll also need to fatten up your own princess once she’s on the throne to keep the enemy from kidnapping her and taking her back to their jail.

So as an owner of the PSN version of Fat Princess, why should you buy Fistful of Cake? First, you can play it on the go which is always nice. If you’re without Internet then you can play a skirmish with CPU allies and enemies, and if you do have Internet access then finding a game is as simple as selecting “quick match” from the menu. There are also new maps, a new Grim Reaper game mode, and a much-expanded single-player story mode. This makes a lot of sense. It’s understood that if you’re buying DD games from PSN that you’ve got access to the Internet, but Fistful of Cake is available via UMD and PSP users aren’t always sitting near anopen wifi hotspot. In the single-player story you might find yourself cursing your AI teammates. At first this feels like a slight against the AI programming, but once you’ve played online it becomes clear that teamwork is always hard to orchestrate properly. That’s not to say that the AI couldn’t be better, but it prepares you for online play quite well.

What is Fistful of Cake missing? A couple of big things. There is no voice chat, and there’s no way to invite friends into your game. And puzzlingly, matches are still 8v8 but only 4 players can be human-controlled so even when playing online you’ll be dealing with the AI. For a game designed around multiplayer these are strange things to leave out.

Fistful of Cake is a faithful reproduction of the PSN original on the PSP. If you already own the PSN version then you know what you’re getting and why it’s a good time. For those of you with PSPs but no PS3s then Fistful of Cake is great fun. It’s violent, medieval TF2 for a scant $20 that you can play anywhere. There are online limitations, but they don’t detract from the fun of finding the Grim Reaper hat and wreaking havoc for a while.

Pros: Great multiplayer experience on the PSP, easy to find online games

Cons: Limit of 4 human players, no voice chat, can’t invite friends to a game