Fall Guys – Series X

Fall Guys is a live service and this review was written during Season 1 and reflects the general game at this point in time

Like most people who played the original release of Fall Guys on PS4 (before the move to free to play) I’d already had my fill and moved on. There’s rarely a live service game I’ll stick with for a significant amount of time but Fall Guys dropping on PSN Plus meant I spent a few months enjoying/hating a fair bit of it. I got so into Fall Guys I was part of the Beta players on PC who would live test the seasonal content before it went live. It won’t surprise you that the news; Fall Guys is going free to play, cross play, cross progression and coming to Switch and Xbox was great news to me. I’m glad to report that Fall Guys is still worth the leap.

If you’ve never played Fall Guys before the premise is simple; It’s a 3D platformer game where you play through Takeshi’s Castle style race/challenge/survival stages and progress to the final and try to win. The jumping, diving and grabbing are both simple and just spongy enough that you can both have fun bouncing off players and obstacles but can also time your jumps and use skill to improve your odds of winning. You can easily play with anyone from any console and the interface for making a party across games is shockingly easy given how technically difficult it must be. There’s no benefit to playing on PC so console and PC gamers are just as much chance of falling off as anyone.

The current Fall Guys is a lot more focused on getting you to try different modes and gameplay styles than it was at launch. Squads and Duos have you dropping into games in a random team of 4 and 2 but with no voice chat for random players this is a fantastic experience. There’s no muting, dealing with spam or anything more than a player using a theatrics animation excessively. If you fail but your squad wins you still win to and as different shows require different skills you can find yourself helping each other to victory.

When you win as a squad you earn crown shards that go towards a crown and moves you along that Season’s pass. It can feel a little low on rewards at first but the chances of winning as a squad are incredibly higher than solo so this balances the risk rewards nicely. Fall Guys does appear to be a cluster at the start but you’re one button from running and falling over and over again. The big chunk of new content, stages and team based events is a welcome refresh to the game as a whole and if you played up to the winter themed stages you’ve a whole plethora of cyber/neon stages to experience to.

This is a review of the Series X port of Fall Guys but I feel like I should mention the Switch port quickly. It has a clever trick where the animation frames drop when the action is busy to allow for a more accurate gameplay experience. The Switch port was perfectly playable and ran surprisingly well but shifting across to the Series X was like jumping 2 generations. Everything runs silky smooth on the Series X and the higher framerate (60fps on Series S/X) allows all the animations to be shown as they were intended. It was always a great game on PS4 at launch but on the Series X Fall Guys is bright, colourful and silly in the best way.

What isn’t fun about Fall Guys is the shift to monetizing the outfits and cosmetics. Previously your crowns for winning or in-game currency could be saved to buy specific cosmetics but now the store is divided up into premium currency you purchase and free kudos points. There is a Season pass for experience you gain through playing and a separate one for crowns you win and although you can earn the premium currency through the Season pass (and it has been confirmed you can buy the next Season Pass with the premium currency) we’ll have to wait and see if that’s going to be the case in future. For the time being Mediatonic have made it very clear they want a free progression path.

At the time of writing; Fall Guys is the best kind of fun. For about £8 you can buy the Season pass and the amount of content you’ll be unlocking doing daily, weekly and Season challenges will quickly have you earning cosmetics and currency. If you just want to drop in and fall off that option is there to. Fall Guys is still fantastic just for a quick go and the regularly changing different events and shake ups to shows keeps the variety just enough to keep you coming back for more.

9/10 – Guys that Fall are super fun