The team over at Mediatonic is mixing up the ever-popular battle royale genre with its new multiplayer-focused party game, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. But in this battle royale, you won’t find guns or building mechanics, only competitive challenges that are extremely fun to play.
Fall Guys is basically Takeshi’s Castle mixed with a little bit of Wipeout as 60 competitors are matched up against one another to compete in a series of wacky challenges and due to the nature of the game’s physics engine, things can get exceptionally crazy.
The first challenge that was thrown my way was one that required me to run down a linear path that was blocked off by several sets of holes that were filled with blocks. You can jump and then dive into things in Fall Guys, so the trick here was to figure out which of the openings was the correct path and the only way was to dive into the blocks. If you chose the wrong path, you would lose a few seconds of your time because you would have to run and find the correct opening.
The picture below should help you get a feel for how it all works:
You start off competing with 59 other players but after every challenge, a certain number of players get eliminated and then there can only be one winner at the end of the day.
The second game I played was Tail Tag. Some players will start off with a tail and some won’t and the end goal is to have a tail once the timer runs out. You can grab other players’ tails but everyone comes running after you if you have one so you need to strategize and use the environment to your advantage by gaining the high ground or by other means.
Tail Tag is insanely fun and if you play right, you can even use the giant squeaky hammers that are swinging around to launch yourself away from impending tail-grabbers.
Due to my good luck and pro video game skills, I managed to survive this round and make it to the final and third round in my preview.
The last event took us competitors to Fall Mountain, where the almighty crown sits.
There are typically about 10-20 players left at this point in the game and now we all have to make a mad dash to the top of this mountain that is full of treacherous hazards such as big balls and other spinning/moving objects.
What’s even crazier is that you can grab onto other players and drag them to slow them down or pull them in front of one of the balls or something –I can’t say for sure if that’s a thing that I did to win the round but it might’ve happened –I can neither deny nor confirm.
Coming out victorious twice during my gameplay demos for Fall Guys, it’s safe to say that not only am I the world’s greatest Fall Guys player, but also that Devolver Digital & Mediatonic have a hit indie game on their hands.
Once it releases on PC and PS4 this summer, it’s sure to cause a ruckus… in the best way possible. It’s extremely frantic and chaotic and there’s no doubt that it’ll be the party game to show off to friends and family.
