Upcoming online party game Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is less a battle royale and more a madcap lighthearted gameshow, with 60 colorful, pillowy, bumbling players constantly ricocheting off each other. This newest multiplayer outing from Mediatonic Games (Gears POP!, Murder by Numbers) also happens to technically be Devolver Digital’s first foray into the battle royale space, even as the studio may seemingly shy away from that genre designation.
It seems like a new battle royale crawls into the market every week, borrowing a HUD element here and a game mode there from what’s come before, but Fall Guys is claiming its own unique space within the noise. Now with the open technical beta, players can see what the game brings to the table, but it will probably be those crucial post-launch months that measure the staying power of the experience and how it grows alongside its community.
Fall Guys is, first and foremost, charming and light-hearted in tone. The playable fall guy character is a blank slate who looks something like a rubbery sausage with limbs and moves like one, too, fumbling around and frequently getting knocked off balance. A growing collection of wearable cosmetics imply that most anyone in a 60-player match will look different, though the early beta’s freebies mean that there are plenty of equipped wolf costumes and Gordon Freeman/Headcrab skins (the latter cosmetic is especially adorable). As expected, playing through matches rewards a type of currency called “kudos” and “crowns,” and levels up the player, granting greater access to more cosmetics. There are absolutely no apparent P2W elements, though it does seem likely that there will eventually be some sort of direct currency purchase option for superfans who want every outfit.
The game is sectioned off into rounds which comprise a "show," with the first round always culling the starting 60 players down to 44. Each round randomly selects from a variety of game types, and certain types seem reserved for different rounds in order. There are races through obstacle courses, team-based matches, and survival activities without respawns, like seeing who can stay on top of a spinning multi-sectioned log with incoming hazards. It’s a fairly good mix to start off with, though it’s a little disappointing that some activities seem stringently attached to round number; for instance, the first round will always be a race and never a team game.
Lead game designer at Mediatonic Joe Walsh is certainly familiar with the battle royale genre, though he’s quick to distinguish Fall Guys as a different beast altogether:
I was playing PUBG and things, when that came out originally, and was like, instantly hooked on that 100-down-to-1 [format]. But, with Fall Guys, we didn’t really come at it thinking, "All right, Mediatonic as a studio needs to make a battle royale, Devolver needs a battle royale.” We really started from the fact that being on game shows is really cool, and we want to make a game that makes you feel like you’re on a game show.
We never had that feeling of like, standing lined up with all these other similarly useless people like you see on Takeshi’s Castle, like you see on Total Wipeout. And, really, we started from that point of, "I wonder what it would feel like to be in that show." Takeshi’s Castle is kind of already a battle royale. And it was a bit of a happy accident from there, that battle royales just exploded. We never expected them to be as big as they are when we started working on this project.
Aside from its round-based structure or game show inspiration, the first thing that hits players upon starting up Fall Guys is its cheery, bubblegum aesthetic. Competitive or no, the contestants look playful and completely unserious in tone, and levels seem to be built entirely out of child-safe foam mallets and playpen parts. Characters can’t “die” in any visual way, so there’s no dismembering or anything like that, although they can fall down bottomless pits and get pinballed around the vibrant levels. Players can also temporarily grab each other and stymie a well-timed jump, but can also wriggle out of each other’s grasp. “We didn’t want the game to become this constant brawl,” Joe concludes. “It’s not supposed to be like, a fighting game.”
Senior level designer Megan Ralph emphasizes the diversity among the different rounds and potential games:
I think like, the way that we’ve tried to sort of temper the ability to really ruin someone else’s game is by having a variety of different types of rounds…with different games to play. Some are based on memory and logic, there are survival rounds where you just have to wait out a timer by avoiding something. There’s stuff like that, which doesn’t really emphasize that ability to pull people off something or to ruin their game. There’s a combination, I think. A lot of the stuff we’ve shown has been physical, but there’s an equal amount of levels that are like, stand on a tile or remember images.”
With the beta underway, these game types, known as “logic” occasionally do pop up. One has players stand on a series of tiles with cycling images of fruit on them, then one fruit will appear on a screen—remember the tile with that fruit and avoid a pitfall elimination. For the most part, though, the activity that seems the most common are races/obstacle courses, which can be fun and frustrating in equal measure.
Similar to some other battle royales, a race in Fall Guys can either go off without a hitch or get thrust into a cycle of fumbles over minimal error. A perfect run can be ruined in the last leg by missing a jump or bumping off of another player at the most inopportune time. Interestingly, a good number of races in our play experience included a single player dawdling near the finish line, opting to ignore completing the race before trying to grab a few players right before they qualify; no matter how cute a game looks, griefers are bound to come out of the woodwork.
That’s not really how Fall Guys operates, for the most part, and a surprising number of failures in the game seem less to do with a sniping griefer than just the jumbled action itself. Obstacle courses always bottleneck in certain hot zones, where mobs of stampeding players push and pull against turnstile gates or a player attempting a tricky leap is promptly run over. This is where the game’s premium energy seems centered, the inevitable chaos of 60 people reaching for the same carrot — or, as Joe puts it: “Firstly, when we’ve been designing the game, we wanted there to be shenanigans.”
At launch, Fall Guys intends to have 25 different games, though the current beta seems to have withheld some. The first two rounds seem to constantly cycle around a very small handful of levels, but these are hopefully just a sample offering. Some levels are also a lot more interesting than others — Door Dash asks players to pick a randomly assigned correct path and is a frequent intro round during the beta, whereas a surprise Round 3 game of Fruit Chute can be a better thrill, with players trying to predict the tumble of careening oversized fruit down a conveyer belt.
Grouping up with friends is an option, though it presently maxes teamplay out at four. If a teammate is eliminated, they can opt to stick around while their friends continue on, though this would arguably become tiring over time. With a large enough player base, the game could greatly benefit from a special team-based mode, which either focuses on the competitive team games or simply eliminates players by group. One risk to the current setup is later matches getting emptied of players if several group members are eliminated and the qualifying ones opt to leave and re-queue anyway.
That’s a more of a technical hurdle to overcome than a gameplay one, and despite the fact that this is a pre-launch version, Fall Guys works very smoothly. There wasn’t a single bug or game-break, matches populate in under a minute, and there’s no extended pregame lobby to sit through. Once inside, players are tossed directly into the first round, given a view of the level, then a 3-step countdown. Fail that first round and they can re-queue, though some failures certainly sting more than others. Megan references this push/pull treatment of failure in the game, which directly contrasts with battle royales on the whole:
“We basically wanna celebrate failing, that’s something we really emphasize. Because it is competitive, and you are gonna feel amazing if you win after the five rounds, but you’re not gonna feel bad in this game if you get knocked out in round two. It’s gonna be funny, you’re gonna have a laugh, and you’re gonna jump back in again really quickly, so that’s one thing that was really important to us, that it didn’t feel like a blow to get knocked out in a round.”
The bright kid-centric veneer of the game may scare off the shotgun-pumping gamer set, but the king-of-the-hill thrill derived from taking the crown in Fall Guys might just be the perfect middle ground. So long as requeuing remains fluid, it can be quite fun to attempt another go at this game show, and some of the levels are a blast — aside from the aforementioned Fruit Chute, Egg Scramble is a fun and messy team-based level where players try to hoard and steal the most eggs, and Hoopsie Daisie requires teams to score points by jumping through rings that spawn at random throughout the level.
Children are undoubtedly going to love Fall Guys, and the lack of in-game chat channels makes the experience as neutral and harmless as possible for unsupervised play. It's nice to spend time with something competitive without also having to deal with racist epithets and nasty public game chatter. It's multiplayer on a fairly large scale, without any forced interaction aside from a cute emote... and maybe grabbing another player before they grab the win.
Fall Guys is currently set to release on PC/Windows and PlayStation 4 on August 4.