Fall Guys Is A Hilarious Knockabout Alternative To Battle Royale – Preview

Fall guys fall down, get up, and do it again.

With its emphasis on mass participation with one winner at the end, it would be easy to think of Fall Guys as another quick and easy attempt to jump on the battle royale bandwagon. In practice, however, the inspiration for Mediatonic’s manic multiplayer dates further back to the TV gameshow antics of Takeshi’s Castle and It’s a Knockout.

Playing as the titular fall guys, adorably pudgy contestants with stubby legs, you’re running a gauntlet of wacky mini-games. While the player count is whittled down after each round, there’ll be no shooting in this arena – everyone’s far too cute for that. The demo we took on at Gamescom is still an early build, showcasing just three rounds. I was only playing with a few other human players while bots filled out the rest, but my experience still set me up for the kind of hilarious hijinks that can be expected.

The first round, ‘Door Dash,’ shows how accessible the gameplay is as everyone simply runs through multiple doors to reach the end. There’s enough chaos when there’s 100 of you charging through a few small doors (although in this build, the max number is set to 80) but of course, the trick is no one knows which door you can actually burst through and which one will have you bouncing off in failure.

With so many players, however, and no real risk of being culled that early on, I opted for the sneaky tactic of hanging back and letting the other fall guys take a shot on the doors, watching their mistakes and waiting for the opportunity to make a beeline for the correct door.

The stakes are raised with the second game, ‘Tail Tag,’ where essentially half the player count will get eliminated. The key to victory this time is ensuring you finish the round with a tail, so if you start with one, you just need to run around the arena’s platforms and swinging hammers, while the other fall guys desperately try to chase you down to nab a tail for themselves.

This introduces a bit more physicality in the player interaction. Players must grab at each other in a desperate bid to nab a flag, though things don’t get physically violent per se. A swinging hammer might send you flying but a fall guy simply dusts themselves off and carries on waddling through the mayhem.

Finally, we have ‘Fall Mountain,’ a relentless obstacle course where only one fall guy can be (literally) crowned the winner by reaching the top of the mountain and grabbing onto the floating crown – though if you miss the jump, you can just as well be sent back down. Although the idea is that rounds are always randomised, matches will always culminate in a dash up Fall Mountain, which I suppose makes it the equivalent of the Eliminator event from Gladiators.

It seems a fitting conclusion to the light-hearted hilarity beforehand. With around 20 fall guys still in the mix, this isn’t a tense finale between a few elite competitors.

It ultimately depends on how the other mini-games fare, as Mediatonic envision launching the game with around 30 trials to rotate through the random generator. That tried and tested battle royale structure is still there, with numbers dwindling each round and each mini-game changing the dynamic slightly.

Obviously, this is just a demo, but I’m also expecting each match to be made up of more than just three mini-games, which may still be shorter than a typical 15-minute match in Fortnite (for comparison, even the lacklustre Mariothon mode in Super Mario party is made up of five minigames).

With battle royale taking over the gaming landscape, Fall Guys is clearly an entrant that wants to capture that sense of mass participation but in much more accessible terms. Still, I don’t think it’d hurt to inject a little more drama into the events. Door Dash is, of course, amusing. But when only the bottom few are eliminated, there’s no real incentive for finishing first in that round. Plus some may prefer fewer contestants left in a tighter arena in Fall Mountain.

There’s definitely a good laugh here, though it will take a few more mini-game variants and perhaps a test amongst all human players to really determine just how special Fall Guys will be. Hopefully, it won’t be just a novel throwaway contribution to the oversubscribed battle royale party.