Gang Beasts (Xbox One)

Gang Beasts isn’t the kind of multiplayer game that will hook you with its competitiveness. Rather than trying to make a game with some unique idea to draw in players, Gang Beasts essentially just hands the players some floppy colorful toys and tells them to make their own fun. There aren’t many rules or complications and your goal in the little brawls is always just to get the other players out of the arena, but the simplicity that makes this easy to pick up also leads to some of its issues.

 

A regular round of Gang Beasts has every player enter the fight as colorful little characters. Squat and squishy, these characters don’t have many features beyond their eyes and whatever costume you pop on them. The costume selection is actually quite broad, ranging from clothes tied to professions to animal-themed onesies to even pop culture references like ones based on characters from Rick and Morty. You can make your own custom suit by mixing and matching pieces from others, but there is definitely a wide variety of options and while they mostly are there just to look silly, some can confer small advantages or even hinder you in the battles. Giving your character a cape gives people something extra to grab, but that also makes it harder for them to get to your body for a proper hold. They don’t feel like they have such a huge impact you’ll be punished for not grabbing one with some potentially helpful accessories though so you can at least embrace the chance to be silly in how you choose to dress for combat.

 

In fact, the combat in Gang Beasts is deliberately skewed not to hinge on skillful play or strategy. Must of the action has the physics deliberately out of whack to try and trigger ridiculous circumstances. The game does appear to hold together well, players never seeming to outright fall through the level or anything truly disruptive, but you might find yourself slipping between the bars of a railing, grabbing someone by the mustache so you don’t fall off the stage, or twisting into unusual knots as you try to grapple someone as they grapple you. The floppy characters are made to be tossed around like rag dolls and move around with almost the same uncertainty as a toddler, always looking like a good push could knock them off their feet. Luckily, you won’t constantly be tripping over unless other players are hitting you with some direct aggression. Your main methods of direct attack are a headbutt with short range, a kick that can be hard to tell if it made contact, and the more reliable punches that have good reach and clear indications of when they hit. You also have some extra abilities like a drop kick that has a bit of odd timing to activate properly, the ability to go limp if you like, and a simple run, but most of your options don’t come close to the utility of being able to grab things.

In Gang Beasts there is no health meter to wear down and your attacks mostly serve the purpose of trying to knock someone out briefly so you can grab them and carry them towards their doom. Grabbing is actually the most important action your character can take, this not only necessary for carting other players to the dangerous areas of an arena but the best counter for being grabbed. Being knocked out doesn’t last long and isn’t always going to trigger even when someone is smashing their fist into your face repeatedly, so many fights become more about winning the constant grappling mayhem near the edge. Someone might be tossed off only to have the other person grab on to the other player before they plummet and it can actually be hard to break the chain of neither player really being able to chuck the other to their doom. Even if you punch and kick at someone dangling from your body you might not always shake them, and this leads to the double-edged sword of Gang Beasts’s action.

 

If you could easily toss another player out of the level it would be too quick and not that exciting. Gang Beasts thrives on the constant back and forth as your characters flop over each other and try to gain the upper hand. The constant shifting of fortunes as you try to finally shake your clingy opponent and make them tumble out of the arena is where a lot of the game’s silly fun comes from, and trying to find areas of safety or scrambling as everyone ends up with the floor crumbling beneath them means the whole battle won’t just be failures to toss each other out of the arena. However, there are very much cases where the game can stagnate as no one is gaining any ground and there are no extra variables to force a change to the stalemate. Some arenas have things you can pick up but the characters don’t really have the muscles to wield them as weapons, and sometimes even if someone is tossed over successfully, there are areas you can climb back in safely and resume the fight.

Arenas thus have to carry a lot of weight in making a fight avoid these long periods of little progress. Some levels like the Roof struggle with this as there is essentially no gimmick, and even in the Incinerator level with its conveyor belts you can easily fight the force of the moving floor to stay in the action. Some levels just make the arena small so it’s more likely the grappling sessions will eventually have someone slip and meet their end like the tiny wrestling Ring, the window-washing Gondola stage, or the two glass Elevators. Levels with crumbling floor like Girders, ground that opens up like the Chute, or the crumbling ice of Buoy do more to keep you constantly moving and add energy to fights since you can’t spend too long entwined unless you want to go down with your opponent. Some gimmicks like the signs that can smack into players on top of the semis in Trucks might be too impactful though since they’re more likely to get the kill than actions from the other players, but then the Aquarium’s tentacles that serve as the main way to be pulled to your death are surprisingly easy to avoid even when your opponent is trying to get you grabbed by them. While there are some stages where you can find safe spots to have less than exciting grappling matches, the game does mostly provide arenas that eventually force players away from the constant grabbing as some other concern influences your movement.

 

The free for all mode definitely feels like it hits on the stalemates more than the Gang mode where players are divided into teams. It’s much easier to break up the monotony of going back and forth between grabbing and being grabbed when a group of players can coordinate their efforts to shove someone out. The cooperative Waves mode feels like it tries something similar in pitting human players against AI controlled teams, but the AI seem to have a hang for the game’s inconsistencies and make for fearsome opponents who aren’t too fun to fight even as a team. Soccer is surprisingly where Gang Beasts might be at its best, mostly because the problems with its loose approach to character physics actually benefits the action. Since this mode focuses on the objective of kicking a soccer ball into a goal, grabbing and holding onto another player all the time is not a winning tactic. You need to maneuver your floppy little person around effectively while also roughing up the other players to try and keep them from scoring. The ball itself can’t be grabbed, meaning most of the outcome of the match is going to be decided by how you choose to interact with other players while still remembering to go for goals. It’s not as prone to hilarious moments since there’s only one arena, the Alley, and it’s pretty straightforward, but it is much closer to a game mode where you can feel confident in your actions than the regular fights where it can be hard to determine why someone finally falls out of the arena after a grab fest.

THE VERDICT: Gang Beasts wants to have floppy physics so its silly characters can get into all sorts of hilarious hijinks, but the limitations placed on the goofy jelly people also mean fights don’t pack a lot of punch themselves. Grabbing is too important to eliminating players and survival and thus many fights end up on the edge of a level as players keep jostling for dominance, the other attack methods not reliable or strong enough to consistently turn the tide. Luckily, a majority of the levels throw some sort of monkey wrench into the action so that you can start to get battles with a bit more texture to them than constant grappling, and mode offerings like soccer and team fights can make decent use of the deliberately lacking controls. Gang Beasts can be good for a laugh with friends, but its rudimentary design and its penchant for slipping into stalemates for a bit too long means it’s not winning out when compared to more cohesive party games.

 

And so, I give Gang Beasts for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. Gang Beasts is the kind of party game that many people say you would want to be drunk while playing, but that always felt like saying you need to lower your standards to enjoy such a game. Gang Beasts is funny whether you’re intoxicated or not, the floppy bodies of the characters in silly costumes leading to ridiculous scenarios reliably enough. It’s good for a laugh when things are falling apart or taking strange twists in the more interesting arenas, but some of the excitement will fade if players just keep clinging on or fail to make any headway in wrapping a level up. Stagnation in fights where people are too canny for the gimmicks or the big twists have already failed to eliminate players lead to play where there isn’t much left to do but hope a head punch might actually knock someone off you this time. Soccer and teams do a fair bit in giving Gang Beasts a mode where such stalemates aren’t easily found and outside of levels like the Aquarium there is usually some point in a stage where something gives and you can move onto the next battle, so thankfully Gang Beasts almost never gets so slow or lifeless that it would completely put a player off from wanting to play the next stage. The moments of little action are easier to forgive when suddenly you find yourself in an arena where something absurd happens to get the whole group laughing. Gang Beasts’s unrefined controls and character physics sometimes hinder the actual fun of playing while being the catalyst for those goofy highlights, making it hard to recommend as a game for a group to come back to but one that doesn’t hurt to try for a short while.

 

Gang Beasts’s action feels less like it’s trying to make for fun fights and more about having those moments where something memorable or hilarious happens thanks to how you play with your little colorful jelly people. Fighting on a crumbling Billboard, getting hit by trains in the Subway, or sliding off the slippery sides of a Blimp feel only like the exclamation points placed on a rather simple sentence though. If things aren’t going awry or the players aren’t trying to make their own fun with the toys the game provides it can easily slip into a game that feels more sloppy than silly. The actions players take seem to land either as consistently ineffectual or perfect for prolonging a match, so while Gang Beasts is certainly amusing, it definitely needs the silliness to smooth things over and give you an experience that can actually entertain despite the gameplay deficiencies.