There’s something very pure about Mediatonic’s Fall Guys. Taking in the spirit of shows like Takeshi’s Castle or Wipeout, Fall Guys has you and a horde of jelly bean shaped goofballs fighting for ultimate glory.
Fall Guys
Developer: Mediatonic
Price: $19.99
Platform: PC & PS4
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Fall Guys sees you and sixty other beans going through various rounds of obstacle courses, sometimes by yourself and other times split into teams. If you’ve seen the previously mentioned shows you’ll know what sort of tone to expect: comical clumsiness. You take your jelly bean, dress them up in a variety of colors/patterns/outfits, and send them on their way through twenty-four various obstacle courses. These can range from straight “race to the finish” such as the precarious See Saw where you’ll have to work with and against other players to balance seesaws to get to the finish, to survival style minigames like Block Party where you have to dodge incoming walls meant to knock you into the slime below, and finally team-based games like Egg Scramble where your team has to collect eggs in your goal and keep others from stealing them. With this many games to go through, I’m surprised at the ratio of fun to boring games leaning heavily to the former, with just two or three games being ones I groan when they appear (Tail Tag variations I’m looking directly at you). Admittedly, the obstacle course games are the best by a large margin, but for the most part even with the games I’m not the biggest fan of there’s still some fun to be had.
In an unexpected move, the game actually features a battle pass type system. The game is currently in its first “season” where as you play you’ll go up in tiers to earn various cosmetic items to deck your fall guy in. It’s a feature I wasn’t expecting this game to have but totally makes sense, especially since it’s free with no paid tiers. Besides that, you’ll also be able to purchase new cosmetics in the shop with in-game currency. Fall Guys also features two types of currencies: Kudos and Crowns. Kudos are gained by either playing or dropping some cold hard cash, crowns on the other hand are only earned by winning in a game. In a very interesting twist, the best stuff is locked behind Crowns but there’s no way to actually buy them, only Kudos, which means you can’t pay to get the good stuff, you have to actually play the game.
With its very clear success and popularity, it’d be no surprise to see Fall Guys evolve in the same direction Rocket League has. I do hope they take this opportunity to add minor nitpicking fixes to the overall experience, like adding text to tell you what round you’re heading into in the oddly blank black bar in loading screens between rounds. A stats page along with a lot of all the potential stages in the game would also be much appreciated. Fall Guys is the type of game you just want to genuinely see get improved in any way possible, and I’m eager to see what its future looks like.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the world of Fall Guys however. Ignoring the (expected) server issues from the flood of players slamming the game, there are a few faults with the game itself. My main issue with things is the randomization of game modes you’ll experience, or really the lack thereof. With four to five rounds to go through, and 24 potential minigames to see you’d think each run would be entirely unique but quite the opposite. I’ve dumped hours into the game, going through countless sessions (that usually run up to ten minutes if that), and there are many minigames I’ve only seen once or twice. Stages like Whirlygig or Perfect Match are practically guaranteed to appear, while I’ve only ever seen Rock N Roll once. In a game where each session should feel relatively fresh, I’m instead seeing at least two or three of the same modes over and over again with little to no variety in-between. This makes sense for the final round as there’s only a handful of games that count towards that, but not for the rest of the rounds.
The other (albeit more minor) issue is a few glitchy quirks the game has. When using a controller, and then transitioning to a keyboard to invite a friend can sometimes cause the invite screen to infinitely open and close, requiring a full game restart if it doesn’t stop. Getting eliminated from a game has also seen me unable to exit, forced to sit and spectate for the rest of the game unless I choose to restart the game (and lose the progress I had earned before dying). The most grievous issue I’ve encountered was an odd glitch that only occurred on specific stages. Whenever on Tip Toe, my character would slip and slide as if some unseen force was pushing me. This practically caused me to just accept I wasn’t going to pass that round since it’d be literally impossible to move without being flung off the stage to no fault of my own. I’ve heard this happened on the Hex-A-Gone stage as well (never able to test it since I’ve never seen it in any of my sessions) but I also noticed simply touching the rotating yellow logs in certain stages would cause my jelly bean to go flying off immediately. It made my sessions particularly frustrating considering I’d always see Tip Toe come up, and it made Slime Climb impossible as well until a recent tip told me to disable V-Sync. It’s been smooth sailing since then and my enjoyment of the game has skyrocketed accordingly.
The Final Word
Fall Guys is battle royale at its silliest as you waddle your way through a technicolor game show.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
