Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

You should play Fall Guys if you’re interested in the mechanics of a battle royale platformer. You should not play Fall Guys if you’re looking for something continuously engaging. The first few hours offer some laughs at the expense of 60 players (including yourself) spectacularly failing to overcome the intentionally wobbly physics, but there’s only so much mileage there. It’s frequently likened to Mario Party – except that each Mario Party features dozens of different minigames, while Fall Guys only features two dozen, and they’re all derived from the same five templates. There’s no substance beyond the gameplay, either. The cartoon game show aesthetic is almost iconic in its utilitarian vacuousness. Even the presumably unintentional subtext of the masses literally falling over each other for a chance at fleeting, manufactured glory feels like a G-rated version of “Fifteen Million Merits.”