Katamari has always been a game that was pretty much a genre in and of itself, so I don't know what kind of game I would classify this as. I mean you are technically platforming, but it feels nothing like any other kind of 3D platforming. It's certainly not an action adventure, but at the same time, you can see elements of that in Katamari as well. If anything I'd call it more of a puzzle game.
Katamari Reroll is a remake of Katamari Damacy from the PS2, and playing it again in HD it is just as weird now as it was then. See, you play as The Prince, and your father is The King of the Cosmos. One day he had a little too much too drink and knocked all the stars out of the sky. So he tasks you with rolling up objects on earth to use as material to create new stars to refill the sky.
The narrative reason why you have a time limit on each star is The King of the Cosmos cannot be expected to wait, and that kind of sums up what to expect of the story of the game. You get strange scenes of the king rambling on about things that barely have anything to do with recreating the stars, there is a little story following a little girl and her brother after they hear about the Stars going missing, and a girl who makes really, really weird speeches about constellations after you remake those.
That is the humor of the game, that everything you do and everything anyone says (Especially the King) is so bizarre. This isn't even getting into what it is you are actually doing, and the gameplay itself.
The Prince is about the size of a thumbtack and pushes around a ball called a Katamari. It attracts light objects to it, and as it grows inside it can pick up bigger and bigger things. Early levels you may start with the thumbtacks and by levels end, you are picking up house cats. Later levels you are rolling up small islands, and potentially even magical titans you find floating in the clouds.
Hitting things bigger then you and you lose size off your Katamari, so you have to be careful not too knock to run around too wildly, otherwise, that trio of Sumo Wrestlers forming a human wheel roaming around the streets may cause you some trouble.
Did I mention nothing about this world you are rolling around in makes any sense? At all? That's kind of the beauty of the whole thing. It's amazing this ever became a running series with four console entries and one on the PSP, but they did indeed get stranger and even better after the first game, but that's a tangent for another day.
You control the Katamari using almost exclusively two joysticks. Push them both forward to move forward, turn by moving one stick back, move sideways by moving both sticks sideways. You can charge your roll to move a vast distance quickly, you can 'put on the breaks' as it were, and even jump over to the other side of the Katamari to change directions quicker, though the process gets a bit slower as you grow in size.
While I think it handled better with a PS2 controller, having the two joysticks lined up feels a bit more natural for this game then the staggered set up of the Classic Controller on Switch, but it's just a matter of getting used to it. Other than that, the game can get a bit frustrating when in some cluttered areas or you’re too close to a wall, and it can be difficult to see what you are doing. That can be a big problem considering the nature of what it is you're doing in this game, and while it's noticeable it's also not something that happens often enough to kill the game, and once you start learning when that issue comes up you can work around it.
And that really is the crux of the entire game and the series. You... roll stuff up in the time limit given. There is some variance in terms of making Constellations, though I'm a bit hit and miss on which ones I liked. Rather than size, some of them want a certain amount of a kind of object, for example, to remake Cancer you need crabs. Even Model crabs count. These can be fun a bit of a break from the normal kind of maps, even if it plays the same.
The ones I dislike are the ones where the map ends when you get one of a certain kind of object, such as a cow. See, for that one, even cones with black and white cow patterns on them count. If you want a high score for these, it becomes far more frustrating when you are trying not to pick up something really small and hard to spot, yet you haven't grown to a large enough size these things become negligible (At certain sizes small enough objects begin to disappear from the map. You're not even going to see thumbtacks when you start picking up people in your Katamari). These exorcize just become boring redoing the same map over and over, and every time it's going to be because of something stupid and frustrating. At least these maps you don't need a certain size to advance.
Even the normal maps are pretty simple to complete, though it may take a few tries. The end goal, however, is to get good enough to make a Katamari far larger than the minimum. And that's where you will realize if this game is for you or not, do you like acquiring high scores for the sake of getting a high score? If so, you will have a lot of fun mastering each level of the game and learning how to get the most out of your various tricks like the sudden turnaround and doing a charge. If not.... well it's a very short game, took me about 6 hours, and won't have much reason to replay. For me, it's one of the only score based games I enjoy.
I really love this series, and it's great to see the original get a remake. It's a world and story bizarre for the sake of being bizarre, a wonderful and unique visual design, and engaging gameplay. So long as you don't mind replaying levels just for a high score and nothing else, give the game a try.