Katamari Damacy REROLL Reviews

I first encountered Katamari Damacy back in 2007, when my then-partner's brother looked at me and said, "Let me show you a game that's like giving your PS2 an acid trip." Fast-forward to today, and Katamari Damacy REROLL brings that same bizarre, joyful weirdness into the HD era. The core concept is unchanged; you’re the tiny Prince of the Cosmos, rolling a sticky ball (katamari) around to collect everything from thumbtacks to skyscrapers, all because your dad, the King of All Cosmos, went on a destructive bender and needs you to fix the stars. Who hasn't had an experience like this with their dad?

The twin-stick movement remains a unique and oddly satisfying challenge, but it’s still not perfectly intuitive. You’ll eventually find your groove, yet there’s a steep adjustment curve, especially for new players. That awkwardness is part of the charm, though, and it rarely gets in the way of the fun once you’ve adapted. The worst part is attempting the "dash" move, which was a problem even back in the PS2 days. (8/10)

If you’re looking for a deep narrative, you won’t find it here. The story is basically a surreal excuse to keep rolling up increasingly absurd objects. While the King’s over-the-top monologues and the quirky cutscenes are entertaining in their own right, they’re more flavor text than actual storytelling. (4/10)

This is where REROLL absolutely shines. The remaster takes the game’s blocky, colorful art style and polishes it to a crisp, vibrant sheen without losing any of its original personality. It’s a gorgeous reminder that style can outshine photorealism — Katamari’s world is a candy-colored fever dream that’s just as delightful now as it was in 2004. (10/10)

The gameplay loop is absurdly simple but dangerously addictive. Rolling up progressively larger objects never gets old, and the creative level design keeps things fresh-ish. Still, there are moments where the camera and physics can get in your way, adding frustration to an otherwise joyful experience. Then there's the fact that the game is simply short: I completed everything in under six hours. Even a person who has no experience with the game can probably finish in less than ten. (7/10)

Katamari Damacy REROLL is a faithful remaster that nails the visuals, keeps the unique gameplay intact, and delivers a one-of-a-kind experience you simply can’t get anywhere else. The story is paper-thin and the controls still have their quirks, but if you’re in the mood for something colorful, weird, and endlessly charming, this is a roll worth taking. (7/10)

Katamari Damacy Reroll is a widget game from Japan. Weird games like this appear periodically, but Katamari Damacy is perhaps one of the strangest. The game has an almost psychedelic nature to it, with the plot of the game – such as it were – being that the King of All Cosmos went on a bender and accidentally blew up all the stars and the moon, and you, his son the prince, must now help him make new stars by wandering around the earth and rolling stuff up to make into new stars.

The actual core gameplay of the game is quite simple – you roll around a ball, and as you run over stuff that is smaller than the ball, it adheres to the ball. The more stuff you roll over, the bigger the ball gets, allowing you to roll over more, larger stuff.

Thus, the actual gameplay of the game is to wander around the world trying to find stuff that’s small enough to roll up into your ball while avoiding colliding with big things, which will knock chunks off your ball that you will have to pick back up if you want to keep your size up.

The game is one about scale, and as you go through the game, the scale becomes ever larger and more ridiculous. You start out on the same scale as tacks and pins in the first level, and in each level, you are expected to make an ever-larger ball. Sometimes you start out larger, sometimes you start out smaller, but as you progress through the game, the scale keeps going up and up. At first, you start out in a house. Then you go around a town. Then “the world”. Indeed, in the final level, you go from the level of rolling up small plants to rolling up entire islands and mountains.

Unfortunately, there are only really three major level layouts, though they are populated slightly differently with objects in each level. While this allows you to familiarize yourself with them a bit, it also means that they get a bit played out by the end of the game.

There are also some side levels where you “make a constellation”, which really just consists of mostly the same challenge, except you mostly are just trying to roll up as much of a particular type of object as possible in a level which is often full of them. Some of them switch things up by instead making it end the moment you roll up ONE such object, with your goal being to make a big enough ball to grab the biggest possible object.

Overall, the game is weird, but not tremendously challenging; it took me only about 7 or so hours to get through the whole game and get all but the 100% completion achievement. And unfortunately, the game’s single, simple note wasn’t really enough. While it was fun when you finally reached a new level of scale and started picking up larger objects, a lot of the levels were played out on the same few scales, so it got a bit dull and tedious. If the game had been any longer, it would have been worse, but as it is not hugely so, it managed to end before it totally wore out its welcome.

Still, this isn’t really a game I’d recommend. It’s a weird game, but it didn’t really feel particularly fun to me. It was mostly interesting for its weirdness, but honestly, that wasn’t enough to carry it even as short as the game was.