No “pivot” jokes in this review, I promise.
Moving Out 2, by Melbourne’s SMG Studio in conjunction with Swedish studio DevM, is the sequel to their breakout 2020 hit Moving Out. The premise in a nutshell: you and up to three friends play removalists (Furniture Arrangement & Relocation Technician, or F.A.R.T. — the game’s most Australian joke by far) in a toy box world, working together and apart to wrestle furniture out of homes and into your truck. The furniture comes in different sizes and weights, and must be moved solo or with a buddy. Because this is a physics-based party game, there’s a lot of Getting Stuck In Doorways, or Accidentally Breaking The Windows, and Is Everyone Cool If I Just Yeet This Lamp From The Second Floor Balcony?
The sequel continues this special brand of chaotic puzzle-solving by moving the F.A.R.T. team out of the original’s town of Packmore and into increasingly ridiculous new worlds and biomes. Each home or site you attend must be swept clean of all removable furniture/doodads/livestock (don’t ask). Each job is set against a timer — the longer you take, the less you’ll make at the mission’s end. You’ll also have to think about the available space in your truck. It’s not enough to simply throw everything in higgledy-piggledy. You certainly can do that, but it’s a great way to run out of space fast. It’s much more efficient to arrange everything (reasonably) neatly and chuck all the smaller, throwable items on top, out of the way. This obviously takes time — and time is money. So, you’ll need to balance your organisational habits against your need to get a bloody move on.
Moving Out 2 introduces a load of new player skins and customisation options, allowing on-screen silhouettes to stand apart from each other. This will be a crowd pleaser certainly — I’m very excited about playing an office worker triceratops man — but its real function is to give each player on-screen a clear, distinct silhouette. It’s now much easier to read what’s going on and track your character in the chaos than in the previous game (and thank god).
Keeping things moving is much more difficult when you’ve got three other people rollicking around the level, and that’s the fun of games like Moving Out 2. Chaos erupts immediately and spontaneously through player actions and the many quirks of the game’s deliberately argumentative physics. If you’ve played games like Overcooked! or Totally Reliable Delivery Service, you’ll have an idea of the pandemonium that will break out in your living room the moment the round begins. Slightly bungling controls + multiple players + a game world full of seemingly simple problems with sophisticated answers +a ticking clock = the best kind of bedlam.
But wait! Perhaps you’d rather not get a noise violation! No problem, Moving Out 2 now has online multiplayer, meaning you can get a couch stuck in the front door and scream at your mates without ever leaving the comfort of your own home. It’s cross-play enabled too, so even if your friends are on other platforms, you can still get a game going.
Moving Out 2 isn’t trying to reinvent any kind of wheel because the wheel it came up with last time was already quite good. This is an iterative sequel in every way — a spring cleaning, if you will. It tightens the match-to-match loop a bit and greatly expands its accessibility options while filing down a few of the original’s roughest edges to make it palatable online. The new Assist Mode also goes a long way to making the game feel much less fiddly for casuals or non-gamers being handed a controller for the first time, and for those without a complete range of motion in their hands.
If you’ve never played the original, or you’re looking for a friendly, more accessible take on the same material, Moving Out 2 makes an excellent argument for itself. One to put in the rotation for your next gaming night, without a doubt.
Moving Out 2 is out now for PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Nintendo Switch. Review conducted on Xbox Series X with a pre-release code provided by the publisher.
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