Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is in fact a Knockout

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is unconventional battle royale mayhem.

Despite several glorious server crashes when the game first launched, Fall Guys, much like it asks of its players, picked itself up and kept going. And honestly, for a game like this to not hit server problems wouldn’t be likely. It’s a free game that has up to 60 people playing at once. It’s bananas.

If you’ve never seen the classic “(MXC) Most Extreme Elimination Challenge” you know exactly what you’re getting into here. If you haven’t, Google it right now and watch. Or let me explain.

When you start, you get your bean-like character ready mostly by picking colors and a costume (of which you start with one). Then it’s go time.

You plummet through the air until a counter lets you know 60 people are ready. From there you and the other 59, will race shoulder to shoulder through a randomly chosen gauntlet. This could be anything from spinning platforms to massive see-saws.

Your main weapons are jump, dive and grab. Jumping and diving is a must and grabbing is mostly to try to throw your opponents off or, in some stages, grab items.

After the first 45 make it across the goal, the rest are ceremoniously removed from the game by being ejected from the screen.

Then it picks a random stage again. These stages can get rough. For example, my personal least favorite involves making your way up a zig-zagging obstacle course that slowly fills up with slime. Touch the slime even once and you’re eliminated. Done.

In addition to races, there are also elimination challenges. These consist of incredibly difficult ones like the one I just mentioned to bizarrely easy ones where you play a match game on giant cards.

As you go from round to round, you’ll eventually make it to the final (hopefully). I’ve only made it to the final once. I hated and loved it at the same time.

Five of us got shuttled to an arena where one was wearing a raccoon tail. The other four of us had to chase the player down and steal it. Whoever was wearing the tail when the timer ran out was crowned the champion. I didn’t win but out of the two minutes I held it for about 1:40, right up until I tripped and fell towards the very end… I’m not salty.

All in all, though, Fall Guys is beyond fun. I had to get some sleep and I ended up having a “one more game” cycle that threw me two hours past the rubicon of when I’d get enough sleep for work. If you have a PlayStation 4, the game is free through PS Plus (you can buy cosmetics) and I absolutely recommend this. It’s also available for PC for $19.99.