Downloadable content is one of the great perks of the current generation of consoles. Gone are the days where you are rife with indecision, prior to dropping at least $100 on a new game you hope will keep you entertained for 10 hours. With the PlayStation store, Xbox Live and the Wii Shop Channel you can get a decent gaming experience for a reasonable price, which eases the pain if it plays like a clarinet with rabies.

The good news is Fat Princess is definitely not a clarinet with rabies. Fat Princess is basically a large, multiplayer game of Capture the Flag, where the “flags” are actually princesses. While there are a few game modes (such as deathmatch) most games involve capturing the enemy princess, and holding her in your dungeon while your princess is kept safe. The hook here is these princesses have a fondness for all the cake that happens to grow all across the landscape. By stuffing your princess full of delicious cake, you can make her dangerously obese to the point where the enemy can only move the she-whale at a snail’s pace.

The game works on a class system where you can pick up and wear a hat, giving you the attributes of that particular class. You have the classic warrior, archer, mage, priest and worker to switch between, and each contributes to the war effort in a different way. They all participate as you would expect (the archer shoots arrows, etc), but by upgrading buildings in your castle you can get extra abilities for the classes, which adds depth to how they can be used. For example an upgraded priest can suck the life from the enemy, while retaining his ability to heal team mates.

From my experience, the worker is probably the most important class to victory. The worker is required to upgrade buildings, build siege weapons and create new ways to access the enemy castle. Smart use of the worker class can easily turn the tide of the battle. However, online gaming is not the well of quick thinking individuals you hope it would be. Often in a game, the majority of the action is comprised of meat grinders where players throw themselves into unending melee combat, requiring only a mastery of mashing the square button. By keeping an eye on the map you can try to circumvent these choke points, but inevitably if most of your team is throwing themselves to the wolves it’s hard to make a difference.

Fat Princess is a great multiplayer game, but the experience can be made or broken by who you are playing with. There is some initially unseen depth, and when you begin to understand the secrets of different maps you can become a difference maker for your team. Daring raids into the enemy castle through a secret passage makes for some highly entertaining gaming. On the flipside, a bloody stalemate in the middle of the map can result in frustration and excessive wear on the square button. Overall, it’s hard not to recommend Fat Princess, especially with a price tag of $30. If you’re jonesing for some well-populated online action, this is one of the better titles on PS3 so far.