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Have You Played… Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout?Competitive ragdolls
Competitive ragdolls
“That is genius,” I said to myself as I caught my first glimpse of the colourful chaos ofFall Guys: Ultimate Knockouton YouTube, and my Takeshi’s Castle-filled childhood came zooming back to me like at the end ofRatatouille. How is it that, before this point, no one had thought to take the all-too-familiar battle royale formula, and make it about ragdoll characters propelling themselves through obstacle courses and messing each other up along the way, rather than the typical smorgasbord of guns, looting, and ignoble deaths?
On second thought, there are ignoble deaths aplenty inFall Guys. The game thrives on them.
What really makes and breaks this game is the imprecision of your actions. It’s not something many competitive games can get away with in the way Fall Guys does. Imagine you were in a fight inApex Legends, orCall Of Duty: Warzone, or Fortnite, and you tried to shoot an enemy but your gun jams. Or you tried to strafe into cover, but your character remains rooted, because they’re in the middle of a second-long animation. Players would be up in arms. But when your character in Fall Guys fails to jump when you tell them to jump, or takes several more steps than you intended in a certain direction and plummets off the platform to their death, that’s accepted. Just like the ragdoll physics, this imprecision deliberately injects chaos and hilarity into every round, every tussle with another player.
