PC & console game reviews
It’s a Knockout dialed up to INSANITY.
Fall Guys is a battle royale like no other. Lobbies fill to a maximum of 60 players, each represented by cutesy bean-like avatars customised as owls, dinosaurs, pineapples, and more. Only one player can walk away with Fall Guys’ coveted crown, and the stress of surviving until the end is just as riveting here as fighting to reach the final circle under a barrage of gunfire in your typical battle royale experience. Thankfully, Fall Guys eschews anything resembling guns or grenades. Instead you’ll find a wide variety of colourful party games that are so fun and hilarious that your enduring failure to win never threatens to break your spirit.
A full match takes anywhere from three-to-five rounds, each of which are randomly selected from a field of 24 different levels at launch. Amazingly, there isn’t a bad level in the bunch. Some are more exciting than others, like one that has the mass of bouncy players racing across giant seesaws to be among the qualifying few to advance, or another which pushes players to sprint up a steep hill as massive fruits spill out and attempt to halt their progress. You’ll have favorites, no doubt, but I was stunned to make it through all of the levels at launch without dreading the return of any one of them in the rotation.
Regrettably, there are no private games right now – and given how the servers have been slammed, it’s probably for the best – but you can invite friends to games. There are no squad-based modes, but it’s fun to keep track of where your friends are, maybe even as the cause of their narrow triumphs or hilarious defeats.
On some levels, like a soccer mode called Fall Ball or the especially messy Egg Scramble, surviving players are split into momentary teams, which is about as close as the game comes to being infuriating given how some players refuse to follow the rules of the round. Still, I find myself genuinely looking forward to whichever level the randomiser lands on, regardless of whether I’m running rounds solo or working with a group to move another step closer to getting my hands on the crown.
If novice gamers hear about a new battle royale, they may turn the other way given the genre’s history of sweaty-palmed showdowns. But imbued with silly mini-games, there’s a lot more mass appeal here, and the controls are accommodating to that crowd. The grab mechanic can be used in dastardly ways too, like holding someone in place until they fall off a sinking platform, or dragging someone down to elimination with you. In time, the beginners who may have worried they couldn’t compete may be responsible for others’ untimely slips and falls.
Nothing else has ever paired high tension with complete silliness like this, and Fall Guys reveals we should’ve been doing it a long time ago.
Mark Delaney