Platform Previewed: PC
If you are a fan of games with silly or random contents, and just want to have fun by just running around, falling off ledges and meeting your demise, or by wrestling your enemies (or friends) into an industrial shredder, then Gang Beasts is just be the game for you. From its wobbly physics, to frustrating (sort of) controls, to even its creative environments where you fight, Gang Beasts is surely a game that you and your friends would enjoy, even on just one PC.
This game doesn’t really require much thinking in order for you to win. The mechanics of the game is simple: whoever has the most number of lives remaining, well, wins. That’s about most of it. However, though not complex, the game still challenges you to survive throughout the fight, pitting you against other players. Gang Beasts is an online MULTIPLAYER game, which means you can play with your friends on the same PC, all the while playing with other players online.
The real gist of Gang Beasts, though, is by how fun the game gets. Personally, I was hesitant and found myself doubting whether or not I’ll enjoy the game at first, but then right after I checked a gameplay of it on the internet, I decided to give it a try. The game’s sort of like a platformer brawling game (like GetAmped, for any of you who’s familiar), and punishes you if you fall off ledge, and aides you through interacting with the objects scattered around the area (though there’s not much objects displayed, in the meantime). The game is still in beta, so there’s still going to be a lot of bugfixes, patches, additional contents, and many more.
Now, let’s go deeper into the game. Gang Beasts, although fun and entertaining, has only one game mode right now, which usually always leads to the player by just simply surviving throughout each round. The game gets shorter, depending on which map you are situated in, and will depend on how long it’ll finish by how you or the other players fight out with each other. The game mode’s called the ‘Survival Mode’. In this mode, the last man standing which has not been squished by large objects, run through by cars, thrown off a ledge or any of the sort, will be declared as the winner. You will be fighting the other players in a variety of maps .Though small, each map offers you a number of things (and by a ‘number of things’, it usually means pitfalls or deadly devices) to use against other players to defeat them. There’s even this map where you and the others fight inside an area with industrial shredders. That’s right, industrial shredders. After you knock your opponent unconscious by either headbutting, or sumo-slamming them to the ground, you can then pick them up and throw them into the grinder. Sounds really violent, but the game’s adorable, simple (though bland) and colorful (sort of…) environment relinquishes any bloody thought. Oh, you can also throw them off a ledge with lava on the bottom side of the map. And that’s just one map. There are still others, and some of them include duking it out on top of fast-moving trucks while dodging oncoming traffic signs, brawling inside a subway with incoming trains, and fighting on a gondola, hundreds of feet in the air.
The game might be cartoonish, with its simple graphics, adorable characters and plain colors, but it sure is not a game for kids. You can tell from the start that it isn’t, and even more after playing the game. The characters look cute with costumes one, some even looking like Pikachu, or the Teletubbies, but once you start to see fighters throwing other fighters to giant shredders, off of a speeding truck’s hood, onto giant bladed fans or just simple off of a ledge, it’s enough to leave an imprint on your mind that it was a violent enough thing to do, even on just a cartoonish game.
The game is fun, though, despite all the violence it has. The game also glitches at some point, stretching the characters’ limbs across the whole map. Though it’s not really that much of a trouble, it tends to get annoying as it flashes (or flickers) on the whole screen. The camera is movement’s okay, but if I’d recommending something for the game, it’s to add an indicator as to where you are in the map. It’s kinda hard to find your character behind a corner, so I guess that would be a justifiable request. Not that the developer’s would be able to grant this here and now, though… Also, just a quick point here, as the newer updates arrived, the developer’s decided to take off the HP bar. As to what reason, maybe it’s because it limits out the fun you’re going to deliver in the game (i.e. beatin up your opponent a lot/slamming him onto the ground a lot, causing the repeated course of action to kill off the other player), which is a great thing to do, since the player’s will tend to get more creative with their kills.
But, with all that being said, Gang Beasts is a great game, and has a really great potential to become one of the more popular games out there. Maybe lower the price of the game on the market a bit, though, considering one guy was able to buy Skyrim and all of its DLC’s at a lower price than this game. Other than that, the game is great, and is really fun, especially if you play it with your friends. Graphics is okay, gameplay is fun, but the music is kinda meh. But the game’s still in beta, and there’s really a lot of room for it to improve on, so I’ll be really expecting more from this game and which content the developer’s would be adding soon.
This preview is based on an early access build of Gang Beasts provided by the developers/publisher.
