If your social life doesn't involve gathering around a screen with your friends, Gang Beasts may not have any sort of lasting appeal. Of course it is, you might well cry out, because that's not the point! Perhaps this is a game for the big stage and perhaps it doesn't belong in my tiny bedroom/study (nothing that I do here is studious), but I only find myself in environments where Gang Beasts will have a crowd to please three or four times a year.
Playing at home, without an appreciative crowd and invariably with one other competitor, the sagginess is more apparent.
Laughter is the main reaction, as it so often is with games that combine combat with chaos and intentional clumsiness, but occasional gasps of pleasure and surprise could also be heard as one of the levels revealed a new wrinkle in the game’s rubbery skin, which is alternately as tight as a drum and as saggy as a Basset Hound’s jowls. Every time I found myself in the vicinity, I’d become part of the audience, watching friends, families and strangers doing battle. There’s a falsehood in that previous sentence actually – I didn’t ‘pass by’ once. At Rezzed, it occupied the end of a stand right at the quietest edge of the showfloor and every time I passed by, the battling jelly babies had an audience. Is it a clown performing an elaborate routine or a fussy neighbour standing on the end of a rake? Like many local multiplayer games, crowds are drawn to it but only, of course, if crowds are available. Gang Beasts inspires euphoric reactions, which can be difficult to decipher. It's already a wonderful game, both hilarious and intelligently designed, but rather than simply praising its silliness, I've been thinking about how the whole thing works and why it's satisfying, while also looking at the possibilities that the future of jelly-combat holds. Rounds often come to a halt as the last Beasts standing collapse into a meat grinder together, unsure who is pushing toward and who is pulling away.
It's a surprisingly nuanced multiplayer beat 'em up that combines playgrounds packed with perilous physics and a control scheme that makes combat a sequence of shoving, grappling and tripping over your own fists. Currently in alpha, Gang Beasts is free to download and you should grab it right now.
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