Gang Beasts
Event favorite Gang Beasts is fleetingly fun, but hardly a multiplayer classic.
Nominally a multiplayer brawler, Gang Beasts could more accurately be described as a ‘slapstick facilitator’. Rather than a deep or technical fighting game, it’s more a tool for daft, physics-led pratfalls. It’s reminiscent of Coffee Stain Studios’ Goat Simulator. Though Gang Beasts is comfortably the funnier of the two, it’s similarly shoddy. In some ways, it’s not actually a very good game—yet its weaknesses are often the making of it. In case you’ve managed to miss it during its three years in Early Access, or at the dozens of gaming events where it’s been showcased, Gang Beasts pits a group of wobbly fighters against one another across a variety of compact arenas. Boneloaf’s clumsy, tottering avatars are deliberately awkward to control, and the scraps play out like drunken altercations at closing time—all missed headbutts, amateurish grappling, and the occasional lucky haymaker laying someone out cold.
The controls are intuitive and offer a broader moveset than you might first think. It’s weirdly hard to land a regular kick, but combine it with a jump at the right time, and you can knock an opponent flying. You can throw a left or right jab, but the same buttons can also be used to grab hold of people, railings, cones, girders, or ledges. You can even climb walls, releasing your grip with one hand and hitting jump to swing upward.
In practice, most matches devolve into button-mashing, as you grab and fall over one another, never sure who has the upper hand at any given moment. Amid the flailing of arms, legs, and heads, one of you will go limp, but the lack of any real feedback will rarely let you know why. When someone is prone, the race is on to lift them up and throw them to their doom before they successfully shake off their concussion. Even when all seems lost, you can enjoy the catharsis of taking a rival down with you by clinging onto an arm or leg as you’re dangling over the edge.
Killing fields
The stages present as much of a threat as any opponent. One has giant chutes that open and close beneath your feet; another has collapsing floors; a third puts you all on thin ice floes, forcing everyone to race toward the only solid ground: a bobbing buoy. In one stage, you’re trapped within a glass elevator, and can smash the sides or clamber through a hatch before headbutting the cables and grabbing hold as they snap, sending those inside plunging to their deaths.
All of which makes it a fun local multiplayer game. It’s fun with two players, and appreciably funner with four. But that was true three years ago, and many of the same flaws are still present. Levels have blind spots—during one online game, I was kicked for inactivity when I survived a fall by clinging onto the back of a building, with no way of seeing where I was to pull myself up. The presentation is barebones, and the other game types lay bare Gang Beast’s flaws. The infuriating Waves mode pits you against a series of ludicrously capable AI opponents; it took me four games to win a single round, and even that felt like a fluke. The woolliness of the controls and the feeble feedback are harder to forgive when the playing field doesn’t feel level.
Online play is a bit of a bust, too. Matchmaking can take a while, but the real problem is that Gang Beasts’ clumsiness needs to be shared with others: Feeding off the yelps of frustration from a friend or family member is all part of the fun. Against unknowns, that in-built frustration overwhelms the slapstick. It’s here you realize why it’s been received so well at events: It’s the kind of game people can crowd around and laugh themselves silly for ten minutes, and then forget about. Three years on, Gang Beasts is still that kind of game. But it’s not much more than that.
The stages present as much of a threat as any opponent