Review: Code of Princess

Code of Princess is a 2D rail fighter blending versus fighter combat with beat ’em up level design in an attempt to create something new. Whilst the concept is sound and enjoyable, the game never quite realises the potential leaving the experience feeling somewhat shallow and incomplete.

Luckily, while gameplay can be lacklustre, levels are tied together by an enjoyable story packed full of Japanese styling and self referential humour. It follows the journey of a clueless yet feisty Princess Solange Blanchefleui de Lux on a quest to rid the land of evil and save the world. During her journey Solange meets numerous allies, most of which are playable and handle significantly different to each other. Each comes with a distinct personality perfectly matched to their fighting style which really made me feel the differences between characters. To be fair the story itself isn’t that interesting or innovative but the voice acting and character personality makes the bland tale fun.

Levels follow a uniform format for most of the game. Each begins with dialogue to set the scene then devolves into open combat with waves of enemies and an objective; defeat all enemies or defeat the boss. Seriously, that’s it! Actually there is one level where your goal is to survive and another where you have to protect an ally… but that’s all. This would be ok if the combat was interesting but, unfortunately, that isn’t the case. The system is designed well but lacks the complexity or range necessary to keep it interesting. As mentioned earlier levels are styled similarly to a side-scroller beat ’em up. However, each is an open battlefield you’re free to traverse; you don’t simply progress from left to right. Unlike regular beat ’em up games Code of Princess doesn’t allow free vertical movement, instead it let’s you jump between three rails; background, normal and foreground. Whilst on each of these rails you battle similar to a 2D versus fighter like Street Fighter. This is a clever idea as it gives you the freedom to perform versus fighter type moves without having to concern yourself too much with vertical alignment.

But what about the combat itself? The system is styled like a 2D fighter with the ability to combine heavy and light attacks with special moves to create combos or juggles. Special moves all use familiar key presses such as half circle forward or forward forward attack and vary depending on character. In addition to these moves you have the ability to lock on to an enemy or initiate a burst mode.  Both these abilities deal double damage but differ in effect. Locking on targets one enemy whereas burst mode drains your mana over time and is effective for all attacks. Combine the two right before starting a juicy combo for a whopping 4x damage multiplier. Unfortunately these capabilities are also available to your opponents and there doesn’t appear to be a way to break combos other than using burst. This made for some interesting online battles though as I had to weigh up the benefit of using burst to break a combo against whether my opponent would then use their burst to break my counter combo. Fun times although I would have preferred the usual method of having a counter move instead.

The problem with all this is that each character has a relatively small number of moves/combos. There’s an interesting variety of enemies however the lack of variance in any single character means that you’ll find yourself spamming a couple of combos for the entire game. Luckily the difference between characters means you can mix up your experience a little but the repetitive nature of the missions, unfortunately, means that most story missions just boil down to a grind fest.

Code of Princess sports a pretty standard suite of RPG components although it favours grinding and doesn’t really offer much in the way of versatility. After each level you’re awarded EXP which gains you levels earning you upgrades to your health, mana, speed and attack/defence. These are further augmented with weapons, armour and clothing which can be found or purchased. None of this changes the gameplay though, just your base stats. The stat based systems works well for those who have trouble as, if you’re stuck on a level, you can go just grind, become OP and try again.

In fact, the only time you really have to worry about using skill to win is in the vs multiplayer mode. When playing against a decent human opponent you really have to know the range of your attacks, how long they take to execute, how to read and dodge opponent moves and the best ways to maximise your damage if you want to win. Aside from the vs multiplayer Code of Princess offers a cooperative mode where you can re-play through any mission you’ve already completed in story mode. It uses it’s own internet lobby system (instead of 3DS friend codes) and would work really well… if anyone were playing. In the week I spent playing the game the lobbies were pretty quiet which was quite disappointing so short into a game’s life.

In summary, Code of Princess is an enjoyable game that feels too simplistic to be considered special. It’s quirky and fun to play with friends but over priced at $50; especially when you consider I completed it inside  3 hours and probably won’t play it again. It’s a decent game, but nothing special.