Cuteness isn’t in short supply across Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, from the customizable Minions-like blob you control to the wacky games that will have you dodging giant pieces of falling fruit or running through spinning windmills like a ball on a mini-golf course. This is an unmistakably fast and frenetic battle royale, but one in which actual fighting isn’t really an option: Your tackle has all the force of a pillow, and your grab is effective only at momentarily slowing both yourself and an opponent. Your goal? To outrun or outlast your 59 adorable foes over a series of various elimination stages, and should the opportunity arise to gently push a rival off a ledge, you’ll want to take it.
No amount of cuteness, though, is a proper substitute for competent design. The majority of the game’s 24 challenges are more a matter of luck than skill, with players often forced to fling themselves into plushy and disastrous pile-ups of their peers, hoping that they’ll be able to funnel through an obstacle just fast enough to break away from the pack. As for those unfortunate enough to stay mired in a mob of competitors, good luck catching up with the rest of the field. It’s already hard enough to land a tricky series of jumps given the game’s imprecise physics, let alone to do so when players keep colliding with you in mid-air.
Other minigame-filled titles like Mario Party and WarioWare are memorable for their diversity—how each activity throws something distinct, unpredictable, and truly competitive at players. By contrast, Fall Guys generally just throws other players at you. The contestants are the only variable that really changes. The races themselves feel all too similar, especially once you’ve done them a few times and have learned the fastest routes, and survival challenges are just a series of repetitive actions in which you wait for an often-unseen opponent to mess up first. The game rarely encourages you or gives you the time to appreciate all of the anonymous strangers getting knocked off a course by a foam hammer. You’re too busy ignoring them, after all, trying to avoid the same fate. As a result, courses that are designed to fit 60 players end up feeling under-populated and empty when it’s just you ahead of the pack.
The game also suffers from major balancing issues, and not just in terms of how difficult it is to walk and jump across narrow cylindrical beams in “Slime Climb.” For one, Fall Guys presents itself as a player-versus-player action game, but nearly a third of the challenges it offers are team-based. If you were playing with actual friends, it might be fun to strategize how to best (and most ridiculously) gather eggs from a central area and horde them in your team’s zone, striving to have more eggs than the other teams after two minutes. But you can’t communicate with your randomly assigned partners, so you just have to hope that they’re not actively trying to troll you, as when, in a game of “Team Tail Tag,” your allies keep trying to grab your tail instead of protecting you, or when a game of “Fall Ball” gets nasty, with teammates actively trying to score own goals with the oversized soccer ball. And nothing has been built into the game to discourage such behavior, as there are no leaderboards, no rankings, no low-priority pool, only an endless grind for trivial cosmetic loot. Nothing disincentivizes players from choosing to find their fun at your expense.
Even when Fall Guys is working perfectly as intended—no server issues, quick matchmaking, good teammates, balanced levels—its appeal is limited. If you’re doing well, you’re likely to find yourself racing well ahead of the pack, unimpeded by competitors, in which case you’re essentially just playing the same brief level over and over again, grinding out loot. And when you’re doing poorly, you at least have to contend with others’ unpredictable antics. It’s here that the game feels like it might have a point, however accidental, because losing at Fall Guys feels like democracy in action: You can see exactly where you need to go, but you’re trapped in place by the dozens of obstinate others who maddeningly insist on doing things their own way.
This game was reviewed using a retail copy purchased by the reviewer.
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