The perfect redemy to a long, hard day at work is a good video game. Whether it’s something relaxing or a game to get all your aggression out, you need something low effort or exciting to engage all your senses. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is that game.
In Fall Guys, you play as a wobbly little bean competing against other wobbly little beans. At its core, it’s a silly spin on the battle royale genre but it’s far more fun and hectic than any other battle royale around. Shooting and looting are replaced by wobbling and whomping as players compete in whacky mini-games.
Taking the role of a customisable tiny bean, players in Fall Guys are tasked with surviving a range of mini-games including obstacles courses, soccer matches, tail pulling and egg stealing. There’s a variety of different maps you’ll be placed on at random with the most common modes being obstacle courses of increasing difficulty.
These are fun in their own right, but they also spotlight the jelly-legged physics of your little bean. If you fall or stumble, your bean flops to the ground and rolls dramatically across the course. If you get hit by a flying windmill, your bean is tossed into the air, its stomach jiggling energetically all the way up. Even bouncing into other players gives you a satisfying little shimmy.
With every bean squeezed into tighter and tighter spaces as you traverse the obstacle courses it makes for delightful, wobbly chaos.
Some obstacle courses are more frantic than others, but most are designed to weed out stragglers. Your goal is to survive as many rounds as possible while avoiding the inevitability of elimination. (You’ll need to survive 60 other beans and five rounds to be crowned king.) While early rounds of Fall Guys let you try again if you fall out of bounds, later rounds are more savage and feature a devastating insta-kill that’ll whittle the playing field down a lot. Once the set amount of beans are eliminated, a new course is chosen at random.
The See Saw level is particularly entertaining because it requires careful planning to traverse the weight-based platforms. If you work together with your fellow beans, you can usually make a pretty good go of it — but attempting to cross the plains alone is a recipe for disaster. Tail Tag is another gem. In this level, you play tag with your fellow beans and attempt to capture a golden tail to move onto the next round.
The further you advance, the more points you’ll earn. These unlock various cosmetics and decorations for your bean, with some rarer accessories only being available to people who win a full round of the game. (Crowns operate as a special currency.)
But whether you win or lose, Fall Guys is simple, honest fun.
Every bean is just adorable and the courses are all extremely colourful. It’s whimsical, bright and totally charming. There’s a sense of effortless fun here, making it easy to fall in love with the game. There’s also a heap of variety, meaning even after hours of playing the game it’s unlikely you’ll end up on the same course too often.
Some levels require you to employ your critical thinking and problem solving skills (like figuring out which block you need to stand on to maintain safety) while others are just flat out run-and-hope-for-the-best chaos. There’s a great mix here, and the best part is anyone can take part. You don’t need to spend hours developing quick reflexes or gaming skills, you can just jump in and get started.
With 24 random courses to play through and short five-round games, it’s fantastic for players to jump in and out of. Whether you want a bite-sized gaming snack or a longer play sessions, Fall Guys has enough content to make both styles of playing worthwhile. It’s a great destresser and a delightful way to end a day.
There’s a great sense of ridiculousness in Fall Guys. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad, everybody’s just trying their absolute bean-y best in the game. And with the state of the world right now, Fall Guys is a perfectly wholesome escape.
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is out now on Steam for PC and PlayStation 4 (it’s also included for free with PS Plus).
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