GameTech: Fall Guys provides slapstick fun for a fine battle royale
Some games find success, then fall away. That’s not going to happen with Fall Guys, which has become a sensation since dropping into our lives just a few weeks ago. Although Fall Guys likely won’t reach the consistent heights of Fortnite, it has matched Epic’s juggernaut for livestream figures since it launched.
So how about we drop some information? Fall Guys is a battle royale game with a twist. Instead of competing with guns, you compete over a series of mini-games. A bit like Takeshi’s Castle, the cult TV show from Japan, Fall Guys combines skill, slapstick humour and random chance into a hugely entertaining experience that is perfect for the times we live in.
By example, the first ‘challenge’ that often appears in Fall Guys is Gate Crash, where 60 players run towards a finish line, with closed doors stopping their progress. Some of the doors fall away when touched, others stay closed. As this happens, certain players pull away to the front of the pack, by sheer luck, while others drop back. Only the first 30 players make it through to the next round.
Other challenges require more skill or nuance. For example. Fall Ball is a team game of ‘football’, where you have to score goals by thumping a giant ball into the next. Block Party tasks you with avoiding walls that come at the group with speed – if you don’t hit the gap in the wall, it will push you into the slime below. Hex A Gone is a very clever challenge, where tiles beneath your feet disappear, meaning you have to keep moving or else fall to the next level below. The longer you survive on a given layer of tiles, the greater the chance of survival.
Then there’s Tail Tag, the challenge where certain players get ‘tails’ and you steal them by bumping into those players. The players with tails still intact at the end of the round progress. Like the name implies, it’s a giant game of tag. Another simple challenge is Hoopsie Daisy, where hoops randomly appear across the map and players must jump through them first to score points for the team.
There are 24 challenges in total, meaning plenty of rotation in the runs and lots of variety for player to enjoy. What makes Fall Guys such a success, however, is the sheer sense of joy that exudes from the game. Despite the small elements of skill involved, this is really a game about luck, chance and having a big party with 59 other people. It’s colourful, sully, both relaxing and exhilarating at the same time – it’s the perfect antidote to the seriousness of 2020. No wonder people have fallen for it.
Meanwhile, the better it becomes, the more people might start falling over themselves to get Xbox Game Pass. Easily the best deal in gaming right now, Game Pass is about to get even better with the addition of Project xCloud, Microsoft’s game streaming platform. In short, Game Pass is now going to allow for players on mobile and other platforms to ‘stream’ certain games for playing on those devices, instead of downloading them to console or PC.
We’ve seen this attempted multiple times before, including with Google’s flop Stadia, but the difference here is that Project xCloud will be freely available as part of the already excellent Game Pass, and no longer a separate paid service.
This means Game Pass will not only have a huge library of downloadable games that keeps growing, including every new Microsoft first-party release, but it will also include 100 cloud streaming titles that can be played on any compatible device, like mobiles.
Project xCloud officially joins Game Pass on September 15, but in fact a beta version is already available hosting 30 games right now.
You know something is good when the editorial copy reads like marketing copy. Game Pass is worth praising, however, as one of the rare cases in gaming where the customer is really being placed first. Although Xbox doesn’t have the best games lineup for next-gen at this stage, it definitely offers the best value.
