Cheerful music plays. A quick pan across the map lays out the territory in play, full of bouncy shapes, bright colors, and semi-devious traps. And then the whistle sounds, and 60 goofy Minions wannabes start trying to climb, fall, and bonk their way to their collective goal. It’s not Spain’s famed Running Of The Doofuses: It’s Mediatronic’s Fall Guys, the battle royale game for everyone who’s ever been too intimidated by those uber-cool Fortnite kids to try a battle royale game.
The premise itself is “Aw jeez, why didn’t I think of that?” simple: 60-ish pill-shaped, stubby-limbed competitors are brought into an online game show, then winnowed down through a series of rounds that see them climb mountains of goo, dodge falling fruit, and throw themselves into various scenarios of non-harmful bodily harm. Every round knocks out another few competitors, until a final race determines the winner. Repeat until your retinas burn out from all the neon pastels, or your dopamine drip dries up, whichever comes first.
The brilliance of Fall Guys, then, is in taking a concept—in this case, the battle royale phenomenon that’s made Fortnite one of the biggest video game success stories on the planet—and moving it from a genre with a high bar to entry to one with virtually none at all. First-person shooters like Fortnite (or Apex Legends, PUBG, CS: Danger Zone, COD: Blackout, H1Z1, insert your preferred mishmash of letters and wordshapes here) all require a level of familiarity with the mechanics of aiming and shooting in order to thrive. If you haven’t spent years teaching your hands how to draw a bead on another digital human being who’s busy trying to murder you, too, you’re probably never going to crack the upper echelons of games of that type. But the challenges presented by Fall Guys are intuitive: Run. Jump. Don’t fall in the goo.
Like Tetris 99 before it—but without even the fear of self-inflicted failure from a mis-laid block baked in—Fall Guys lets people who’d never pick up a virtual firearm experience the joys of battle royale. Which remain myriad: The invigorating tension of watching the roster of your fellow competitors get whittled down. The gentleness of losing—because, what, were you really going to beat 59 other people? And the rare, incredibly invigorating feeling when you do, in fact, take home the crown.
All that, and Fall Guys is also purely fun in its own right: The colors are bright, the physics are goofy without feeling impossible to manage, and the games you play—obstacle courses, team tag battles, virtual Wipeout, and more—are legitimately enjoyable, like long-form versions of Mario Party minigames. (And without the need to get four friends around the TV to get the appropriate levels of chaos.) The most important element, though is that accessibility: Fall Guys is a game anyone can play, pretty much regardless of their familiarity with games, with the softness of the visuals, the looseness of the controls, really everything about it re-assuring its players that, win or lose, they’ll be okay. The fact that it’s free for the taking this month for anyone with a PlayStation 4 and a PS Plus subscription only sweetens an already adorable pot.
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Downloading this now. After spending a few weeks killing my way through Seattle with Ellie and Abby I could really use something silly and fun for awhile.
I really hope that’s a gaming reference.
This pandemic has been brutal…
It’s super fun and casual until you make the final round. Then it gets super tense. I literally cheered and jumped up and down yesterday when I won the whole thing for the first time because I was so relieved to finally pull it off.Edit: Also I’m currently dressed as a hot dog, so there is that (though you have to level up to get that outfit.)
It’s kind of the perfect, I have an hour, this podcast is an hour (or can be sped up to be an hour) lets do this, type of game. I just wish there were more games and more randomness.Forget every game being 4 rounds. Every once and awhile let’s have, 1 round winner takes crown match.
Not sure how much you’ve played, but some games don’t show up as much. I think there are at least 20 games. And games tend to be 3 to 5 rounds. (Slime Climb is the biggest 3 game round killer since it is fun but also the worst.)
In all the times Slime Climb has come up for me I’ve never finished it. I find Egg Scramble to be the worst.I like Team Tag Tail, though I’m in the minority there, though I can understand why Tag Tail would suck when it’s the final round.I’ve only made it to the final round like 4 times in the week.
I’ve finally finished Slime Climb a few times, but that area with the jumps and the pushers is just the worst if you aren’t at the front. As its just everyone desperately trying to get through it.
Egg Scramble has the problem that if you are in 2nd half way through,
the best strategy is just to go after 3rd place. And if 1st place is
smart, they will too. So some games you are screwed if you start out the
worst.
The problem with Team Tag Tail is just standing around for the first 1:20 of the 2 minutes is just as effective as doing anything.Tip from my 1 win: Hex B Gone is more about cutting off and making your opponents fall than staying as high up as you can. I used to try to jump from hex to hex because that really slows down the rate of the hexes disappearing but just running and giving your opponents nowhere else seems to actually be the strategy because even if you are 2 floors up when you fall there won’t be much to land on.
The only one I’ve ever won had Tag Tail as the final round. I had no tail until the last 5 seconds when I was able to nab it and run out the clock. But up until those last 5 seconds it was basically just me running around like I was lost.
This feels like a pretty apt metaphor for life in general.
I won a round of Royal Fumble by holding on to the tail for the entire final minute and I never felt so stressed out in my life.
Spent about an hour on it and was laughing the whole time. It’s a lot of fun.
I’ve played a few rounds, and it just sorta feels like being a penny in one of those grocery store donation bins, where you drop a few coins in and they swirl around a cone on their edge until they fall into the center; you’re just propelled by physics and whether you make it to the end is barely under your own control.
Knowing the boards and knowing when to dive definitely benefits you. I probably haven’t been knocked out of the first round in at least 20 straight games because even when I get knocked around, I can make a run at the end to qualify. I’ve only actually won once, but I pretty much always can at least get to round 3.
Yeah, there is some luck involved (mainly boiling down to being on the right team in the squad games), but you can definitely control your outcome with familiarized skill. Know the “Safe” routes on the obstacle courses, realize that diving is the best way to not fall off See Saw, etc. I feel like Door Dash is an outlier in terms of being at the mercy of the physics once everyone piles through the last gate, but overall, it rides a nice line between rewarding skillful platforming and lady luck smiling on you to get you to the final.
Its somewhat amusing to watch on Twitch but for the price it sure is tiny in scope (seems to be like maybe 10 different round types only). Also yeah skill level isn’t really a thing since so many random elements that get in way.If ever goes on sale on the Nintendo Switch, happy to give it a shot but the PS4 (with its required yearly + sub) or PC only just makes me not want to bother. Strikes me as truly stupid to not have this game ready to go on all platforms at launch. Lot of money to leave on the table for a game that is clearly a flash in the pan type that six months from now people will be going “remember that Fall Guys game from a few years ago?”.
Honestly, releasing a Switch port down the road is the best thing for this game. It will turn back up the heat after the cool-down of the PS4/PC release. Specifically, as you have just said, people will want to jump back in because the experience is now more portable, easier to pick and put back down, and will invite more players who missed out on the first experience. If this game was released on all platforms at the same time, it would have died off completely as soon as the Fall schedule of games started to roll out on digital storefronts and physical shelves. At least now it has a chance of a second coming or long burn.
I’m quite enjoying this game so far. I’m one of the people who got it for free on PS4. I run, I bounce, I jump and sometimes I even win! Very rewarding, very fun, highly recommended while it’s still super popular.
This game is a masterpiece. I feel like people who are worried about winning might get frustrated with it but if you go in and laugh and the hilarious nonsense it’s a guaranteed good time.And even with that attitude I’ve won once already!
Even in the best-case scenario, it’s a 1-in-5 shot at winning the final round, so yeah, I don’t beat myself up over losses.
It’s a great game from an accessibility standpoint, but it could use a little polishing up in certain mini-games. Anything grabbing based is a bit of cluster with how hit-or-miss the actual grabbing mechanic feels, and there’s definitely a lot of frustrating opportunity for griefers right now (had a game last night where several team members in Egg Scramble spent the match grabbing teammates to prevent them from doing anything). But the groundwork is super promising, I just hope that they keep refining it instead of riding the microtransaction coattail to profit.
Fall Guys is the first battle royale game absolutely no one can kick butt at
That’s probably more accurate.
It’s so stupendously silly that I don’t even feel bad when I lose, because an anthropomorphic jelly bean getting smacked around still hasn’t stopped being funny.
The way this is described gives me Playing Bumper Balls in Mario Party on N64 Vibes. Ready to bathe myself in even more nostalgia this pandemic!!!!
Tried it but I just don’t get the appeal for anyone over 25 (not a judgement criticism). I felt like a pachinko piece with a pinball tilt mechanism at work. But I have an INTP personality so it probably wouldn’t be the best game for me since I like solving problems.Seems like the kind of game to be playing while smoking a spliff/drinking wine or something due to it’s extremely short, simplistic A.D.D.-like nature and the seemingly randomness of the environment outcomes.
Counterpoint: I played it for less than half an hour before I got annoyed, uninstalled it and asked for a Steam refund.
During that time I lost in Slime Climb (in the first round) four or five times. If there was a single-player practice mode maybe I could have finally gotten past the one piece of it that kept murdering me, and gone on to lose somewhere else until I could get through it. But nope.
I got through Dizzy Heights two or three times, with no trouble. There’s that stupid matching game that doesn’t eliminate anyone. There’s the almost completely random tail-stealing team tag thing. The fake door one eliminated me twice. I didn’t see any other levels.
Overall the game reminded me of all the things I don’t like about Mario Party, except that the bits in Mario Party where other people are taking their turns are much more tedious than waiting for a new Fall Guys game to populate.
Admittedly I laugh pretty hard at a lot of things and I am generally easy to please, but I have absolutely Fallen in love with this game, Guys. It is hilarious, and although you can definitely gain an edge in being familiar with the maps, there are plenty of player made variables that can throw you for a loop.
I consider myself a decently skilled gamer, but I tend to give up quickly in the battle royale genre due to an inability to spend the kind of time with it that I need to in order to gain an edge over the more skilled and invested player base.
I haven’t won a crown yet in Fall Guys, but I’ve been awfully close, and the ride to that near taste of victory has been more fun than any other BR type that I’ve played so far. It is damn good fun!
I’m also a sucker for silly party/mini-game based games, but no one else around me seems to enjoy them as much or wants to opt in to playing them, so FG is super pleasant for me in regards to being able to do ‘party’ gaming with others.
I’m hoping that the success of this game inspires other non-pewpew-themed battle royales, because I really enjoy the concept, but not the shooting.
Fall Guys is a chill and fun game but it really needs server improvements,workshop map creator and more mini games!
It won’t last long if developers focus on releasing new skins and cosmetics instead of new content and improvements.
The game is fun but it would be sooo much better if there was an option to invert y axis on console. It’s very frustrating when your natural instinct is to press down to look up only for your view to suddenly be of the ground. It’s especially difficult in a game where you have to keep your eye on what is going around you to avoid being flung over the side. I reeeheally hope they’ll add the option soon.