Drink More Glurp
Disclaimer: this bizarre party game contains sponsored content
PC
Human tradition dictates that, on a semi-regular basis, our strongest must come together in displays of might to determine who among them is the superior being, dominance usually depending on how quickly one can get a ball in a hole from some distance away. Sports are weird. And that’s before you even get to the capitalism bit.
Drink More Glurp’s aliens have very much got to the capitalism bit. Having received a sports broadcast from our planet, they’ve decided that the colourful logos plastered across stadium arenas and popping up on screen every five minutes must be the entire point. And so, they’ve made their own homage to our Earth sports – long jump, lawn darts, pachinko and cannon dodgeball among them.
It’s a pass-the-pad local multiplayer game; each player takes charge of a bandy-limbed competitor. In the grand tradition of games such as Mount Your Friends and QWOP, you use the thumbsticks to struggle against hilariously nitpicky physics, as simple movements such as running or throwing become infernal mental calculations. In a deft balancing touch, the person leading the pack on points at the start of each round goes first. Taking your turn last gives you an advantage – you’re able to see how your competitors deal with hauling their mass across a blocky assault course, and nick their cheesiest strategies. They flop, so that we might run.
Or, indeed, windmill our noodly arms to propel ourselves further in a long jump effort, or use the grab function to slingshot ourselves down a slanted route filled with obstacles. A short while later, we seethe between howls of laughter as another player conquers the same hill by figuring out that the aliens’ round bodies are in fact wheels, and he can hold his arms aloft to coast along at speed, like a nonthreatening mantis at a downhill rock concert.
The events are challenging enough, without the added wrinkle of Drink More Glurp’s many fictional sponsors: Earth advertisements may be irritating, but at least they don’t alter your sphere of gravity or cut off one of your arms in order to get their message across. These in-universe brand deals drastically change each minigame, and are randomised. Thoroughly so – with a pool of about two dozen events and two dozen sponsors (and growing, we’re told), we’re in little danger of seeing the same combination twice. The result is akin to WarioWare, if Wario decided to become an influencer.
But don’t let that put you off. It’s a laughriot – more so than we were expecting, given its perhaps too-obvious debts to other indie couch co-op darlings. Attempting to cross a series of platforms when Skid Marker Pro has superglued wheels to our hands is just annoying enough to be funny, while Flying Duck Airlines’ gift of wings turns out to be quite useful in one mode where we try to bounce and attach as many sticky orange pellets to our body as possible before the clock runs out. Still, there are always the lessoptimal combos: trying to dodge cannonballs while our arms are bent into crab-like shapes proves tiresome. Meanwhile, the light show put on by the modifier that turns the ends of our arms into rainbow-laser shooters is pretty, but a near-useless distraction when trying to haul ourselves up a set of stairs.
Still, Catastrophic Overload is aware of randomness throwing spanners in the works of a fun party game, and has banned certain event/sponsorship combinations from occurring. It’s also working on implementing difficulty levels, so if you are after a challenge, you can pick one that might throw up some of the more finicky fusions. And, unless we’ve drunk too much of this particular brand of flavoured drink mix, we can see this becoming a party favourite.
Simple movements such as running or throwing become infernal mental calculations