Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in the §341 aphorism of The Gay Science:

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"

In doing so, he described the hypothetical question about how should we ought to face our lives faced with the plausible possibility of everything being repeated again and again in an endless fashion, coined The Eternal Return of the Same. According to Nietzsche, the answer lies not only within coming to peace with it, but to actively love our destiny, whatever it may hold for us.

Fall Guys is an interactive essay about positive nihilism. A treatise about the human struggle to strive for greatness in spite of all randomness and chaos, in spite of all the times we fall down. The takeaway's that we can always stand up and put ourselves to the test in the face of defeat. It's a sweet twist on the lack of inherent meaning in our world. Why suffer under grey and brown tones when you can jump and grab your fellow men for a brief moment in the great cosmic dance and laugh all together, for such is life; we share fleeting instants that come and go, and yet the feelings stay with us until we die. Maybe there's no meaning, maybe history is not an arrow but a circle. None of these should keep us from enjoying life.

Maybe one day, you will get a crown too, and life will begin to have a meaning worth living for.

Fall Guys being now free, the cost to play it is simply your time, and for that I say it's worth it.
The visuals are pleasing, and the gameplay mostly satisfactory with few bugs.
Duo and Squad gamemodes are borderline unplayable without friends as your teammates leaving leaves you at a permanent disadvantage the rest of the run.

The match types are varied though some are clearly weighted to appear more often than others, leaving the more unique ones to get shafted by races, which is a shame.

Having not played it when it released in 2020 I can't speak to updates then, but as of 2024 new content seems to be not very common. Microtransaction skins and some other misc features are still updated, but the available game types stay the same, of which there are arguably a lack.
This is made worse by the fact that there are few game modes all together. I would've liked to see more game modes like "Survival games only" or such.

Do give it a go if you're interested and have time. The only microtransactions are cosmetics so paying money offers you no advantage nor access to non cosmetic content, which is pretty good for a free to play game.

65/100

so goddamn soulless. really fun for 5 hours max, then you want to kill everyone

Now, i am giving this a 2.5 because i have logged hundreds of hours in this game and i did have fun. But promise me, if you have a tendency to get obsessed with video games, do not buy this game.

Its such a fun, innocent bean game. Or is it? The developers are really trying their best to make this game playable but believe me, its not enough. They keep adding new content and do not focus on existing bugs. There is a new game breaking bug every week or so.

And the physics are some of the worst in the game. People run faster than you and can grab you from twice as far away than you can, because the devs don't even want to fix the game's latency. You get pushed around by everyone, since aparently you're light as a feather.

And god, team games are a thing. Given that the collective brain of your teammates always seem to be under the age of 7, its very frustrating to maintain a good place in these tean games.

And what's worse is how toxic the community is. If you point out one annoying thing about the game or something that could be fixed they shit on you for daring to say it.

I have stopped playing everyday for about 2.5 months now and i am very happy. Granted, i would play with my friends everynow and then and the content is still lacking. I think Season 1 was fun enough but all of the bugs, latency, community, and endless amount of new team games just dragged this game through the mud.

this isn't even bad but let's be real this should not cost money to play

Fall Guys is one of those games that everyone and their grandma have been playing the past 2 months. Practically every Twitch and Youtube streamer has been religiously playing this game and its gained a huge following, likely also do to the fact that it was free in August for PS Plus subscribers. Its a pretty simple game with only 2 controls, jump and dive. The game is essentially a series of mini games that consist of different platforming obstacle courses and team games where your goal is to qualify in the top percentile of players in order to qualify for the next round, and after 5 rounds, you and around 10 other players duke it out so there is one winner that gets the crown. There are around 25 mini games of different varieties, some include platforming and dodging different obstacles, others involve team games like soccer, putting eggs into a basket, and stealing tails from other players. There are a couple of mini games that are identical or incredibly similar to other mini games. I'd say of the 25 mini games, around 10 of them are good and around 5 are awful. Most of the team games are bad because its up to luck whether you are on a team that knows what they are doing and can coordinate well, and it almost requires no skills.

Now the thing is starting off too its pretty difficult to win a game. In fact your odds are about 1/60 because that's how many players start in each round. Well, actually depending how well you know the game and if you can pace yourself well and not rush, your odds might be a bit better than 1/60, but I'd say your odds of winning are never going to really be higher than 1/10 when you start off, the first 2 rounds are pretty easy to qualify and are really no problem to get through, but then when you get to round 3 and 4 the odds go do significantly, especially during the team games. By the final round roughly only 1/6 of the starting players even remain. Plus the mechanics in this game are a little odd, like the platforming and jumping just feels a little off, like your character feels like they are drunk the way them move, plus the game gets chaotic often with other players bumping into you and knocking you over and grabbing onto you like assholes. I feel like even though there are only 2 controls in this game, it still feels kind of awkward to control the character in this game and often times the controls will work more against you than with you.

Still, even with the difficulty to actually win a game or a couple of poorly designed mini games, Fall Guys is still a fun game due to its simplicity and how quick it is. If you are eliminated in the first 2 rounds you can exit the episode and quickly join a new game and be ready in less than a minute. Each game really only lasts 10-15 minutes with the 5 mini games lasting around 3 minutes a piece. Plus the game gives you tons of outfits you can buy with points you earn from qualifying in mini games and if you're lucky you can get even fancier costumes by spending crowns you earn by winning games, but you'll be lucky to see crowns unless you play Fall Guys every day for hours and dedicate most of your days to that game solely. That's really it though, Fall Guys really has little customization and variety, you can buy different suits and costumes for your character, but that's about it, there are only the 25 mini games, and I only found 10 of them to really be really well designed and fun throughout, most mini games were just average and a few I found frustrating and poorly designed. I feel Fall Guys just gets repetitive quick and doesn't have variety to make it last long. It's a game that is fun now because its easy to learn and is quick and doesn't take a long time, but theres only so many times you can play the same mini games and the only thing you unlock are new costumes, which is kind of cool seeing the huge variety of costumes, but there needs to be more than just that, it'd be cool if they added more mini games and tried to fix the ones that don't work as well, and did a better job balancing the team games. I think Fall Guys would be better if it focused more on the platforming games and less on the crazy games like the tail stealing or soccer game. They just need to double the amount of mini games and maybe add different modes since it doesn't really have any modes, it'd be cool to do versus modes or do 2 vs 2, 4 vs 4 type games or challenges where you work as a team that are separate from the main game mode. In fact all the team games should be in a separate category and that would fix a lot of the frustrations in the main game. Fall Guys is a fun game to play for an hour or 2 once or twice a week but thats really all it is, a time killer when you have nothing else to play and want a easy and quick game to play around in with other people.