Indie developers are often the ones to bring new and crazy ideas to the table. The battle royale genre is fairly new, but it has established itself as insanely popular. The concept of dropping several players into one map with only one victor is far from new, but games hadn’t taken it far past shooters. Inspired by Wipeout and Takeshi’s Castle, Fall Guys drops sixty players into a game-show that will throw a wide variety of minigames the player’s way!

Fall Guys is purely gameplay based. Each round drops you into a different type of minigame, and there are a few separate categories. Race games have players compete in a platforming challenge to secure a spot in the next round, survival games see players overcome a few obstacles to beat the clock, and team minigames flip the coin to see if you’re on a winning team, or yellow, and final rounds are easy to understand, but all of them are fun. There are twenty-five minigames, so you’ll always be playing something different. The player has very simple controls. You can move, jump, grab other players, and dive. Just running around in Fall Guys is fun, and that means no minigame is ever truly a bore.

I don’t have many problems with particular minigames. I wish that team games would come up earlier in rotation. You always do a race first. If I’m going to lose because my entire team was away, or incompetent, I don’t want to feel like I just wasted a lot of time. There’s a series of minigames where you have to steal, or keep, a tail from others. Chasing people around is fun, but it’s hard to enjoy it when everyone moves at the same pace and sometimes the grab just won’t work right. It’s especially a problem in Royal Fumble. Being a final round game, there are only four to six people in a giant map with one winner. It truly feels like the player who starts with the tag is the most likely to win.

Being a battle royale, Fall Guys needs to keep players around! The game cleverly uses a battle pass system to keep players engaged. You’ll earn fame every time you play, so you’re always making progress. The battle pass isn’t something I typically enjoy, but Fall Guys keeps the conditions low so I never feel like I’m going nowhere.

A successful indie battle royale is almost impossible to produce. Mediatonic, and publisher Devolver Digital, did a wonderful job developing and marketing Fall Guys. My expectations were incredibly low, but Fall Guys managed to be one of the most interesting genre twists I’ve ever seen. Easy to jump into, and hard to be angry with, Fall Guys would be perfect with just a few extra features. I can’t wait to see it grow in the future.