The woolliness of the controls and the feeble feedback are harder to forgive when the playing field doesn’t feel level. The infuriating Waves mode pits you against a series of ludicrously capable AI opponents: it took me four games to win a single round, and even that felt like a fluke. The presentation is bare-bones at best, and the other game types lay bare the game’s fundamental flaws. Levels have several blind spots-during one online game, I was kicked for inactivity when I survived a fall by clinging onto the back of a building, with no way of seeing where I was to pull myself up. But that was true three years ago, and many of the same flaws are still present. It’s a giggle with two players, and appreciably funnier with four. You can even climb walls, releasing your grip with one hand and hitting jump to swing yourself upward-particularly crucial on the Subway stage where you’ll need to clamber back onto the platform before a train arrives.Īll of which makes it a hoot of a local multiplayer game. You can throw a left or right jab, but the same buttons can also be used to grab hold of people, railings, cones, girders or ledges. It’s weirdly hard to land a regular kick, but combine it with a jump at the right time and you can knock an opponent flying. Though they’re not one-button simple, the controls are intuitive, and offer a broader moveset than you might first think.

Boneloaf’s clumsy, tottering avatars are deliberately awkward to control, and the scraps play out like drunken altercations at chucking-out time – all missed headbutts, amateurish grappling and the occasional lucky haymaker laying someone out cold. Double Fine might claim it’s “in the style of Streets of Rage or Double Dragon”, but it makes those creaky arcade hits look like models of precision and refinement. In case you’ve managed to miss it during its three years in Early Access, or at the dozens of gaming events at which it’s been showcased, Gang Beasts pits a group of wobbly fighters against one another across a variety of compact arenas.

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