Reviewed by Brandy Shaul
If you’re like me, Princess Natasha probably wasn’t on your list of “must have games” last Christmas. Actually, if you’re really like me, you’d probably never heard of this game until you started reading the review. While initially the entire concept of the Princess Natasha franchise (webisodes, online games, merchandise) seems thrown together just to market off of young girls, this is one of those situations when I’m glad I didn’t stick to my first impression.
For a bit of background, Natasha is the princess of Zoravia who also happens to be a secret agent in Illinois, whose mission is to stop her uncle Lubek from stealing her throne. Along with your faithful pal, the inventor named Oleg, you jump headfirst into your mission to stop the robots that are turning the town’s citizens into zombies thereby ruining your uncle’s evil plan!
The game is split into around 20 stages (two screens per stage) spread over three sections. While the basic goal of the levels is the same – stop the citizens from turning into zombies, plus destroy all the robots – there are any number of weapons and strategies that allow you to reach the same end. Starting with a simple zapper and magnetic ray gun, you will probably spend most of your time karate chopping robots rather than shooting them.
However, in addition to the normal levels come ones of a bonus variety, which involve you either destroying a group of robots, or saving a certain number of citizens in a time limit, all the while avoiding a hit from the robots, which would cause you to retry. These levels reward you with either a new gadget or a weapon upgrade, normally in the form of more bullet capacity.
Once you get the upgrade on the basic zapper, you are allowed to shoot 99 bullets at a time, and the game after this point becomes a lot easier. Not that it was hard to begin with, but I digress. The levels do get harder as the game progresses, and each third of the game ends with a boss battle, making the challenge a lot greater for the younger audience that the game is technically for.
The graphics are very nicely done, and the comic book cutscenes are a nice change of pace from the standard usually found on handheld titles. The backgrounds in each level vary drastically depending on the environment, whether it’s blackboards in the school levels, or a frozen pond at the ice skating rink. Each background is filled with muted colors while the foreground is comprised of the bright shades and harsh angles which make it easy to tell which objects you can interact with and which you can’t.
As for the sound department, this is one of those rare games that I actually played with the volume at its maximum, as opposed to nothing at all, which is my norm. The game’s soundtrack is at a very fast tempo, which makes it quite upbeat and reminiscent of early cell phone ringtones.
But apart from that, not only do the robot, explosion, etc. sound effects match perfectly to the style of the game, but there are audio cues which let you know when a robot is performing a certain move, or when a power-up has appeared on the screen, even if it’s not visible at the time. And while power-ups aren’t necessary for completing the game, it is a nice gesture nonetheless.
Other extras besides the helpful beeps and bloops include artwork and cartoons from the Princess Natasha universe. These extras are unlocked from the very beginning, which means that unless you are a huge fan of the series, there won’t be much of an incentive to look at them once you’ve started the game.
While most of the gameplay between Princess Natasha’s GBA and DS versions is the same, there is a difference when it comes to the save department, in that there actually is a save system this time around. You have three slots to choose from for saving new games, which is, needless to say, a lot better than having to carry around a pen and paper to write down level passwords.
In the end, Princess Natasha is a very short game. On my first play through, I finished in just over an hour and a half and that’s including the retries I had on some of the bonus levels. The length may be a negative issue for some of the more devoted fans of the franchise, but for the target audience, that being young girls, this is a perfect title to help them enter the world of handheld video games.
That being said, one shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that it’s just the young kids that will get a kick out of this game, as the hour and a half I did spend with the title was a lot of fun. With a simple story and intuitive gameplay, this is a great pick-up-and-play title sure to make anyone wish for the life of a secret agent.
Special thanks to Alison Kain and DSI Games for providing a copy of this title.