197. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout (Mediatonic, Playstation 4, 2020)

It's not too often that I review a game on its release date, but this one was free and I've been looking forward to it since it was announced. Fall Guys is a 60-person battle royale starring a bunch of jelly babies who compete across a wide variety of events. Each event is randomly selected and uses the same simple control scheme of move, jump, dive, and grab. The most basic events are just 3D platforming levels where the goal is to get to the end as quickly as possible. These levels are typically set up like a Wipeout-style course with lots of teetering platforms, or swinging arms, or timed gates that open and close.

In addition to the straightforward racing/platforming levels, there are other more Mario-Party-esque events fill out the roster, many of which involve teams. Here is a small sampling from my time with the game, ranked from worst to best:

- A 2-team game of soccer. This was the most difficult mode to immediately grasp the mechanics of, and the relatively large team size (10) meant that it was mostly chaos. I am happy that they included 2 balls, because it would have been even crazier with 20 guys going after one ball.
- A 4-team round where certain guys start the match with glowing raccoon tails, and you can steal them by running up to the owner of a tail and grabbing it. Which ever team has the least tails at the end is eliminated. This was also chaos but it at least felt fair, and the arena was full of fun obstacles.
- A team-based round where 3 teams compete to store as many eggs in their nest as possible. I probably only liked this round as much as I did because my team dominated, but it was a decent game concept.
- A 3-team round where hoops are constantly spawning into the arena randomly and you get points for your team by jumping through them before the other teams. While this event felt maybe the most random, it also played more to the platforming strengths of Fall Guys, with lots of cool jumps to attempt, though it always felt like the hoops were spawning right in front of everyone but me.
- My favorite non-race event was a static donut-shaped platform that everyone was standing on. There was a bar on the ground that rotated around the platform and all you had to do was jump when it came near you. It was simple but effective, but my main enjoyment came from the fact that I didn't need to rely on a randomly-selected team to succeed.

While I do wish that movement in Fall Guys felt good, I understand that the developers did what they had to in order to make the game widely popular. I just can't wait until something like this but with fun movement / tight controls is released.

3/5, as close as video games have come to recreating the bewilderment that contestants on Takeshi's Castle must have known