If you follow my usual Have You Played articles you probably already realized what kind of games I usually play and talk about - strategy games, card battlers, games that aren't hectic. But from time to time, I also enjoy to play the exact opposite of what I usually get my hands on. Games that are chaotic, hectic, and generally just a blast to play with friends. One of these guilty pleasures is Fall Guys, a game that I have been ignoring for far too long. Ever since I've picked it up, though, it's a game we play every single time I get together with some friends for a gaming weekend.
Fall Guys is a bit like the best levels from Mario Party but without the pointless and overly random tabletop game part attached to it. Every game starts with 60 randomly matched players competing to be the champion. A game is played in several rounds and every round, the worst X players are eliminated from the match. It usually takes about 4-6 rounds before all but around 9 players have been eliminated and the final round starts which only a single player can win. So if you do manage to win a round, you've beaten 59 other players along the way - quite the feat!
Most levels are obstacle courses where you have to move across all kinds of moving parts, jumping from platform to platform, and avoiding all kinds of dangers. Unless you go for the hardcore episode mode you can die and respawn as often as you need during a level. That is until a certain amount of players has made it to the end or the time is up, whichever comes first. There are a lot of different level styles as well, team games, levels where you just have to survive for a given period of time, levels where you have to hold a certain item the moment the clock ends, and so on. Personally, I enjoy the obstacle courses the most, but there's not a single game mode that I really dislike. It can be a bit frustrating to loose a team level just because your random team mates don't get what they are meant to do but as team levels aren't all that frequent this isn't much of an issue.
A single level only takes a couple of minutes with a whole match taking somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes. If you are eliminated you can start a new match right away, so there isn't really much downtime unless you play with friends and have to wait for them to finish when you get eliminated early. What I really enjoy about the game is that there are already quite a lot different levels but they are all partly randomized every time they are generated. So while the general layout is always going to be the same, different traps will be positioned differently every time you play, making the level a lot harder or easier, depending on where things are spawning.
The controls are a bit wonky but that's probably by design. Other than running around, you can also jump, dive, and grab. While it's easy to get these basics, the learning curve is quite steep. Your first few games, you will probably get eliminated pretty early, if not right away. The first step to getting good in the game is mastering the controls. After that, it'll take you a while to understand how the levels work. Once you are at that point, though, things are getting really interesting. The game needs some skill to do good on a regular basis, but there's so much chaos and randomness involved that even the best player will get eliminated in round one sometimes and even the worst ones will make it to a later round every now and then.
Fall Guys is a great game to play whenever you have half an hour to kill but it's even more fun when you are playing it with some friends that are physically present while playing it. Because of its chaotic nature, everybody is going to go crazy every now and then and there's nothing like cheering on the last of your friends that still has to make it to the finish line before the round ends. Being a bit older already, the game is also a bit taxing, though. We usually play it for about an hour or so before moving on to something more relaxed again.
As you can see from the screenshots, the graphics are super colorful and bright. The whole game is probably great for kids as well as the player characters are pretty cute and the game is completely free of violence. You can grab your opponents and try to push them across a cliff but doing so is rather risky and it's usually not an issue but just part of the chaotic fun. There are hundreds of different costumes that can be unlocked for your character so most of the time, every single player has a different look expect for some folks running around in the current seasonal outfit.
Fall Guys has a huge and active community with more than 7,000 people playing on Steam right now. So no matter when you launch the game, getting into your match is only a matter of seconds. Speaking of Steam, though, while I can't say anything against the game itself, you do need an Epic account to play it, even if you launch it on Steam. This is rather annoying to many and has cost the game quite a bit of rating. Right now, it's sitting at 82% positive rating. Before they introduced the need to have an Epic account it had an overwhelmingly positive rating of more than 95% positive votes. While I find it a bit annoying myself, it doesn't really bother me. If you don't have an Epic account Fall Guys will set one up for you and if you don't care for it you can just use a fake address anyway.
All things considered, Fall Guys is a great and really entertaining game that I can only recommend to pick up! It's not, at least to me, a game that you will be playing for hours and hours at a time, but it's a great game to bring back up every now and then. It's sold at 20€ (so probably 25$) on Steam and that price tag is more than fair in my opinion. There are additional ingame purchases available, but they are strictly only cosmetic so I don't really mind them. If you haven't tried the game yet, give it a shot, play it with some friends, and I'm quite confident you won't be disappointed!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!