Fall Guys Review (PC Game, 2020)
This review is based on the PC release of Fall Guys.
Fall Guys is a new kind of battle royale game in the ever-growing genre. Instead of fighting to the death, you compete in various mini-games until only one player is left standing. Think of it as a 60-person competitive Mario Party or WarioWare. Only a certain number of players can pass through each round, and only one person can claim the crown.
The controls are standard for platforming. Fall Guys supports keyboard and mouse and controller. On keyboard and mouse, WASD moves your character. Space is jump. Shift is grab. Ctrl is dive. Mouse is camera. You can adjust the camera however you want as you play, which is a huge plus for any platformer, especially one as chaotic as this.
There are currently 24 mini-games included in Fall Guys. They fall into a few general categories. The obstacle courses are races to the finish line with rotating platforms, swinging pendulums, slime, ramps, and moving walls. The team games force you to cooperate with randomly assigned teammates; the team with the lowest score is eliminated. There are platforming survival games, where obstacles constantly change in front of or around you and you try not to be eliminated. There are also two memory games, where you have to keep track of the changing world around you to survive. The four to five rounds of the game are selected at random, though the final stage is always one of three options.
I’m going to be honest. Fall Guys can be frustrating. As with any multiplayer games, there are people willing to do anything to win. There’s already a significant hacking problem where players have cheated in ways to move faster or just fly to the finish line. The grab ability also causes some players to just block the exit, pushing their nearest competitors off the stage in the hopes of letting weaker players through to the next round. The two issues are representative of the same issue, and sadly the hacking is the only one that can be stopped. A silly party game already has a large try-hard playerbase that can kill the vibe real quick.
That really is a shame. Fall Guys is fun, silly, and charming. You easily unlock different cosmetics and earn plenty of free currency to take advantage of the ever-rotating store front. Cosmetics and currency can be earned just by playing the game, though the game does offer the ability to buy more Kudos from the storefront. No, I don’t like that, but more games than not do that. I am also not in a position to cast stones with the amount of money I’ve dropped on Dead by Daylight since they added cosmetics.
The game moves so quickly that even the more frustrating rounds and mini-games are a small hurdle to overcome. I, for one, hate the Slime Climb level. This is an obstacle course where a sea of pink slime slowly crawls up the level. If you don’t move fast enough, you get eliminated by the slime. The obstacles include a mandatory section of my worst, usually avoidable, obstacles and I just can’t wrap my brain about it. I take the L, collect my experience points and Kudos, and start a new match in seconds. No game lasts longer than 2 minutes. The clip I have at the end of the review edited out maybe 40 seconds of footage from a full game. 5 rounds with some of the longer mini-games took about 10 minutes to get through.
I give major credit to developers Mediatonic. I was quite critical at first, since the game had major server errors at launch and for the better part of a week. Once they caught up to the playerbase, the game has run very well. There are still glitches here and there with loading into matches, but every battle royale has those errors. It’s par for the course. This team is listening to feedback and interacting with the community. That’s only going to lead to great things as time goes on.
I’m having a lot of fun with Fall Guys. The sheer joy of the world, style, and mini-games far outweighs the frustrations created by precision platforming with 59 other people online. I keep coming back for more, picking up more cosmetics, and trying to be the most fabulous and successful little Fall Guy I can be.
Fall Guys is available for PC (Steam) and PS4. Right now, it’s free for Playstation+ members in August 2020. The regular price on both PC and PS4 is $19.99. You can get the game for $17.99 on Steam by using my Humble Bundle affiliate link.
