Gang Beasts is no longer confined to local play with its online beta finally rolling out.
Gang Beasts
Developer: Boneloaf
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
I like to think there’s an art to a successful co-op game night with friends. Play too many of the same games and your nights just get repetitive, introduce too many new games and you run the risk of consecutive bad games that might ruin the night. You definitely don’t want to start the night with the absolute best game either because then it’s just downhill from there. Gang Beasts is that game you don’t immediately play. You slowly work your way up to it and end your night in a crescendo of laughter and play dough wrestlers.
If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have never heard of Gang Beasts, I’ll run through the basics real quick. It’s a four player brawler where each player controls what amounts to silly putty and you’ll clumsily punch your way to victory in various hazard filled arenas. You’ll kick, head butt, body slam, and grapple while trying to not lose from laughing so hard. While the game doesn’t really have any sort of deep combat system, it more than makes up for it in pure charm and stupidity. Punching another player in the face to get him to let go of your arm before he makes both of you fall off a gondola is something that never gets old.
Gang Beasts really shines in its interesting maps where you’ll be fighting on top of speeding semi-trucks, ferris wheels, a patch of drifting ice, or an incinerator room. There’s really nothing out there that quite captures the same feeling you get in Gang Beasts when you drop kick another player, pick him up, and drunkenly stumble your way to chuck him into a meat grinder as your character goofily chuckles to himself.
As great as the main game is, Gang Beasts’ online beta is unapologetically beta in every regard. It’s buggy as all hell with characters sometimes stretching to cartoonish proportions and sometimes you’ll get repeatedly disconnected from a room before you can even connect. Also, the frame-rate can be iffy at times and menus sometimes don’t remember search settings. Currently the beta only has the maps Trucks, Grind, and Subway optimized enough to a playable state with the rest of the maps most likely to be added later. It’s also missing the Waves and Race modes but that’s understandable considering they likely want to focus on getting the versus maps working first. That’s all there really is to the beta right now, with it simply serving as evidence that work is being done to get an online mode added to the game. Also, to get into the beta you’ll have to be an owner of the base game and hope you get a key as Boneloaf slowly opens up spots.
I know there are likely many people out there who never picked up Gang Beasts because of its lack of an online multiplayer mode and I can’t wait for this feature to be properly finished so more people can be exposed to the hilarity of this game.
