Whether it's managing to outlast 12 other players on a neon pink and green variation of Total Wipeout's chaotic spinner or ascending a mountain of perilous obstacles to grab the game-winning golden crown, it's clear from the first hour of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout that Mediatonic has created a truly unique take on the battle royale. Gone are the big guns, the slowly constricting boundary circles, and the overwhelming reams of tiered loot, replaced by the extravagant colors and courses of game shows like Takeshi's Castle and It's a Knockout.
Of course, that initially seems like it'll be a short-lived gimmick; battle royales, after all, have been a genre primarily focus on skill-based play while Fall Guys is far more focused on luck and fun. But the most impressive takeaway after playing several hours of Devolver Digital's newest independent hit is that it has the legs to grow into a game that - with a little bit of fine-tuning and some big additions - could carve quite a popular, long-running niche for itself in the years to come.
Although many will no doubt have seen Fall Guys' central premise throughout the influx of viral videos and social media posts during its recent beta phase, the concept is relatively simple. The player, along with 59 other hopeful online opponents, takes on the role of a wobbly, pill-shaped creature looking to battle its way to being the last anthropomorphic jellybean standing. Of course, it won't be easy, with the game putting them through a series of colorfully chaotic events inspired by some of TV's most iconic physical game shows.
The catch is that Fall Guys' quirky mascots aren't exactly the most gracious of avatars, and will slip, slide, collide, and fall over each other and themselves without much warning. With little more than a jump, dive, and grab button at the player's disposal, there's not much that can be done to avoid having to get stuck into the game's anarchic series of scrums and mobs either. It can be frustrating, even maddening reaching the final stage of a hard-fought battle just for an oddly placed obstacle to completely kill a chance at the crown, but it's a worthwhile sacrifice for Fall Guys to offer such an unpredictable, fun-focused experience. It feels like anyone can steal a win on any given day and that's a rare feeling for a modern battle royale to offer.
It also helps that its lineup of 24 courses are distributed fairly evenly, making it rare to encounter the same lineup of levels on a subsequent playthrough. Better yet, players can jump back into a game in a matter of seconds (if Fall Guys isn't suffering from its now-infrequent spate of connectivity issues) meaning there's little penalty for not qualifying. Clocking in at around 2 minutes apiece, the series of small contests, for the most part, are also a lot of fun, with the standouts thus far being Slime Climb and Hex-A-Gone.
The former sees players ascending a difficult obstacle course while attempting to avoid a river of pink slime that's slowly but surely engulfing the map, meanwhile also making sure to navigate around the horde of other players inadvertently knocking them off obstacles. Everyone who makes it to the finish line of Slimb Climb moves to the next level, however, everyone who falls into the slime below is booted out, making it a decently challenging contest with the ability to dramatically shake up an entire Fall Guys run.
Alternatively, Hex-A-Gone is one of the three final challenges given to players as they duke it out for first place. The other offerings are fairly anti-climactic final hurdles for a hard-fought contest. Death Mountain is a one-sided race heavily skewed towards whoever started at the front of the pack and Royal Fumble feeling imbalanced due to the winner being whoever can bag the awkwardly hard to grab "golden tail" in the final 3 seconds. Hex-A-Gone, on the other hand, always feels like a tense final encounter for any Fall Guys run, seeing players having to sprint across several layers of gradually disappearing platforms until only one contestant remains. It opens up a whole toolbox of fun tactics that can be employed, with players trying to break platforms in front of rivals to send them cascading to their doom and slowly jumping between hexagons to extend the amount of time they can spend on any given layer.
Alongside this pair of short, addictive levels are a multitude of other strong offerings. The colorful Dizzy Heights sees players cross hazardous, direction based turntables, the channeled, time focused sprint of Gate Crash forces them to make split decisions while being hounded by opponents, and the dangerous spinning arm of jump club is a sensational throwback to Total Wipeout.
However, it's clear Fall Guys has some work to do. One of the most pressing issues is team games, which, depending on how lucky the player is, have the opportunity to make or break their run regardless of whether they're the MVP or completely AFK. About midway through most Fall Guys shows, the entire player base will be split into two or three teams and forced to compete in a cooperative mini-game. Rocket League inspired soccer complete with giant balls makes the cut, alongside a hoarding level which sees players push spheres into their respective zone and a contest in which three teams jump through hoops to collect points.
The games are mostly fun but feel like the antithesis of what Fall Guys is trying to be: a free for all, last man standing experience. Perhaps Fall Guys will segment them into a separate squad-based game mode down the line, but right now, they can be one of the most infuriating ways to lose a round when several teammates just aren't picking up the slack.
Some games - while well thought out in theory - feel imbalanced as well. See Saw is perhaps the most notorious of the bunch, with the mode seeing players navigate over a road constructed entirely of the physics-based playground objects. Those at the front of the pack when the race starts are in luck. They merely have to run across a series of horizontal platforms and dash for the finish line. Meanwhile, behind them, players are dealing with a hellscape of 90-degree platforms as far as the eye can see, with opponents refusing to work together to rebalance the seesaws and turning the contest into a chaotic, mind-numbing mess. Tip Toe has the same imbalanced issues, with players not wanting to explore the map to find the secret path to the finish due to it being impractical and huddle up trying to push each other off instead. Meanwhile, Perfect Match needs to be harder as its a simplistic memory game that fails to eliminate players consistently.
Yet, all these issues are bound to be eradicated in subsequent updates, and with Fall Guys proudly bearing a "season 1" tag on its homepage, it's clear there's far more to come. In the meantime, what's here is a refreshing breather from the onslaught of battle royale shooters that currently dominate the market, with its adorably colorful visuals, peppy soundtrack, and easy to pick up gameplay making it a splash of life in an increasingly mundane and repetitive genre. Much like the game shows it's based off, Fall Guys isn't meant to be taken seriously, and there are few multiplayer experiences out there that so wholeheartedly put approachable, inclusive fun at the forefront.
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is available now for PC and PlayStation 4. Game Rant was provided a PC code for this review.