The Flaws that Killed Fall Guys

hey I really like this game but it's got some big problems that need to be fixed thank you you know now seems like the perfect time in history to hang out with friends by playing online party games like I'm pretty sure they didn't even exist during the fall of the Roman Empire so you couldn't do it then and I don't know apparently now there's some virus or something so we've all gotta stay indoors seems like the perfect situation for a party game that's simple enough that anyone from your most advanced Call of Duty 12 year olds to your dog can pick it up woof an activity that can support up to 60 players in a single game and an experience that's competitive but in a friendly way you know something where losing doesn't make you feel the need to stab if all that sounds good to you you'll probably enjoy fall guys but [ __ ] me is this game broken which one oh there we are yeah four guys at its core takes the classic TV game show formula of sending contestants through padded obstacle courses eliminating players round by round until there's only one winner left our version of the show here in borisland was called Total Wipeout because next time could we leave them up there please and combine the joy of seeing superhumans totally annihilate obstacle courses with the much greater joy of seeing the obstacle courses totally annihilate normal people uh Richard Hammond was also there kindly using his hair and bead necklace to remind us what decade it was at the time um YouTube one of the major restrictions of TV shows like this is that they had to make the obstacle courses safe enough that people wouldn't die probably add an even greater restriction from your perspective was that you probably didn't have a chance to take part but if you make a video game with a similar formula both of those restrictions are completely lifted you can have all 60 competitors running the same race at the same time and fill that race with wacky obstacles while not needing to take any concern for people's safety and now finally one of those competitors can actually be you how exciting so load into a game and it'll randomly select the first mini game you're going to play ah the pansexual turntables I love this one this mini game and mini games like it are what four guys gets very right big Wacky Races designed for 60 players to scramble through at once are this game's greatest strength these are the mini games you get served on round one so normally round one will be great in any four guys game you play the pansexual turntables for example consists of a load of obstacles which can either speed you up or slow you down down depending on how you perform on them the fastest 31 players will progress to the next round even at its maximum size of 60 players that's still more than half of the lobby and since less than 50 percent of players are flawless speedrunning Gods there's room for you to make a few mistakes and get delayed a little bit while still being able to qualify for the next round you won't be punished dramatically for mistakes in these races only slightly slowed down like if I were to fall off these beams here like that all I would have to do is clamber back up this ramp to get back in the race I'd be slowed down but I'd still have every chance to qualify for the next round because of the sheer amount of stuff that's thrown at you and just how chaotic these challenges can be slipping up on one obstacle is a very minor mistake to make so it follows that you would only be penalized to small amounts as well these obstacle courses though are completely fair you either progress or get eliminated based on how you perform there are a couple of exceptions that do have a moderate luck element to them but for the most part this game's big multiplayer races a fair fun light-hearted skill based challenges round one is normally fantastic then of course you get to round two the big hectic race mini games of round one are fun and fair but once you hit round two you won't be safe from the games other modes there are still some great game modes that you might get like this slime race in which you have to navigate a slightly smaller obstacle course to escape a rising Lake of goon giving me flashbacks to my previous Life as a body pillow the chat challenges for the most part fair and skill based testing your ability to navigate these obstacles my only real criticism of this level design is that sometimes you'll have to play it with too many other players and it will be too crowded the overcrowding will make the level harder to navigate and will sometimes result in your death unfairly and even if you manage to survive the overcrowding that doesn't mean it wasn't still a problem that there were hordes of players getting in each other's way as they were all trying to do the same thing the track is narrow enough on this level that you really can't avoid the hordes if they're present but besides that this level is great Fruit Shoot is another well-designed level you sometimes get later on in the game in which you have to make your way up this hill avoiding the giant pieces of fruit as they fall down towards you there's also jump Club a level that's basically just been lifted from Total Wipeout this is impressive oh thanks Richard really feeling that enthusiasm there this is a game where you have to correctly position yourself and time your jumps as to not get yeated into the Giant pool of pink goo what what's with the pink goo the only win lose condition here is your judgment and timing making this another completely fair game let's see what else is good uh no oh no definitely not all right just because I was reminded that this specific minigame had the audacity to exist without my permission I have to start talking about the bad mini games now Cutthroat Fall Guys fans this is the part where you probably want to leave because despite its very solid base Fall Guys has a lot of bad minigames built on top of it let's start with the big category for the problem mini games team games every round after the first round in a game of Fall Guys you have a chance to instead of competing in a free-for-all event compete in a team game you'll be divided up into two three or four teams depending on which mini game you've been given and whichever team loses gets eliminated in its entirety this is absolute [ __ ] [ __ ] remember how I said this isn't the kind of competitive experience that makes you want to stab that's because you'll be too busy looking for heavy Ordnance take the minigame egg scramble for this game mode all remaining players will be divided into three teams your job is to collect as many eggs as you can and put them in your team's basket the game runs on a timer and the team with the fewest eggs in their basket when the time Runs Out will be eliminated at the start of the game all of the eggs will be in the middle but as time progresses the only way to get more eggs for your team will be to take them out of another team's basket there are a couple of big problems with this design first and foremost any individual player's impact on the game is far too minuscule for them to feel like they're making a difference to their team in this game for example there are 11 players on each side and the good free for all games you succeed in or being eliminated is down to you in games like egg scramble you have a wildly changing score that you can make Minor Adjustments to you are 1 11th of the deciding factor for whether or not you'll progress to the next round making your success a tiny bit of skill and then a whole load of luck you could be the greatest Fall Guys player of all time and still be eliminated in this round completely arbitrarily even if you gave the best x-scramble performance ever that's the small problem the big problem is that winning doesn't matter the only thing that matters is not losing the losing team is eliminated from the game and the other two teams progress to the next round to any player who actually cares about the game's mechanics their main priority won't be making their score as high as possible it'll just be making sure that one team has a lower score than they did so as soon as one team starts to lose the most logical play from the other two teams is to pick on the losing team so they gang up on the losing team and as a result if you're on that team you're no longer playing against two other teams you're playing against one team that's twice place the size of yours the losing team now has no chance at all as soon as one team starts losing they're completely looked out of the game and may as well give up in the footage I'm currently showing red team the team that I happen to be on at the time goes from a moderate disadvantage to a major disadvantage to literally not having any eggs and the yellow and blue team know that they've both secured their place in the rest of the game so long as they keep it that way the red team is locked out of the game because the game clearly rewards this playstyle with the way it's designed there is no point in me even trying anymore because the second my team gets an egg a swarm people will show up to take it away and eggs ramble is by no means the only minigame with issues like these ones [ __ ] wank ball is a mini game that takes on exactly the same format except instead of trying to get eggs in your basket you're trying to get big balls in your mouth by which I mean on your third of the Court this is another mini game where the main fact is leading to you getting knocked out or staying in are pretty much completely out of your control if you're presented with this minigame as the second or third round in your game of Fall Guys you may as well just spin a roulette wheel that gives you a one in three chance of being knocked out and again since only the losers are eliminated it only makes sense for the winners to gang up on the losing team here it's not really important how my team is doing so long as I keep the red team from getting any more points this game also suffers from the additional ship [ __ ] that the giant balls move around so hectically and chaotically that whoever's in last place changes ridiculously frequently on the plus side this means you aren't going to be locked out of the game if you start losing first but that's only because the winner is basically chosen it random by where the timer arbitrarily chooses to stop in most games of [ __ ] whack ball the winner would change if the game ended 20 seconds sooner or 20 seconds later as a result this game just ends up eliminating a completely arbitrary subset of the remaining players the football mini game in full guys is about as good as the team games can get it only has two teams so there's no ganging up on the losing team and goals are scored rarely enough that if you manage to score one yourself or prevent the opposing team from scoring one you've actually made a reasonable contribution to your team's chances of winning which is nice that you're actually able to do that in this game that's a plus the problem remains though that in a free-for-all game where players are eliminated until only one is left suddenly depending on a random team for an arbitrary number of rounds takes control over winning or losing out of the hands of the player now you win or lose based on the performances of other players that for the rest of the game you'll be competing against unless you happen to get paired up with them again in another team game on top of that the football game is designed for a relatively low number of players meaning you'll usually get it in one of the later rounds when most players have been eliminated unless the game ends up being really close and you're able to make that difference between your team winning and losing you have what is essentially a coin flip right before the final having made it all the way to the penultimate round is the most infuriating time to get kicked out for completely arbitrary reasons if you're still not sold on the fact that it's arbitrary by the way let's take a look at the game tail tag tail tag is another example of the same formula we've seen twice before now teams compete over a resource and whichever team has the least of that resource by the end of the round loses and is eliminated in tail tag though the four teams compete over Tails some players on each team will start with Tails and some players on each team will start without them if you don't have a tail it's your job to chase players that do have a tail and grab their tail off them if you do have a tail it's your job to run away from players that don't so they don't grab yours whichever team has the fewest tails at the end of the game gets eliminated as well as being yet another game that rewards ganging up on the losing team your contribution to your team is completely binary since it's only possible for a player to either have a tail or not have a tail if you have a tail when the timer runs out it's literally impossible for you to perform any better at the game you're contributing the maximum possible one point to your team on the flip side if you don't have a tail when the timer runs out there's nothing you could be doing to perform worse at the game having a tail when the time Runs Out is the win condition and you're not contributing anything to that yet the players without a tail aren't the ones that get kicked out of the game the players that get kicked out of the game are the players that happen to be tied to the team with the fewest Tales between them if you have a tail and still get eliminated you just got eliminated despite it performing as well as you possibly can for your team and if your team progresses to the next round even though you didn't have a tail at the end of the game lucky you you just progressed despite it having been literally impossible for you to perform any worse at the game you were playing I don't know if that's that seems fair to me to fix tail tag you'd need to remove the team element and make it a free-for-all game oh hey there are already two separate versions of that in the game I guess we'll get to talking about those in a minute the final Team game I want to touch on is hoopsy Daisy a game in which you have to jump through rings to score points a positive about this team game is that it's not really set up for you to prevent your opponents from getting points so it doesn't really allow for the gang up on the losing team strategy unfortunately though since it is a team game you can pass or get eliminated completely arbitrarily and the game is pretty much just an RNG Fest the Rings appear in set places at random times so one of the biggest deciding factors as to how many points you score is how lucky you get with the ring spawns whether or not you progress here is pretty much entirely decided by luck with a little bit of extra luck thrown on for good measure having team games in full guys is almost inherently unfair but having something that's a bit unfair isn't enough so most of the four guys team games are made way more unfair by virtue of their design they may as well be replaced with a little scream that just says [ __ ] you before having a one in three chance to boot you from the [ __ ] game glad I made all that progress guess it's time to start again none of this means you can't enjoy Fall Guys heck I really enjoy it but the game would really benefit from having these poor design choices fixed now before I move on to talking about the free-for-all rounds I'd like to talk about da da the Polish this game lacks polish in a big way it's not so much a design problem but I really would feel a mess if I didn't mention this it's important to note that there are no problems here that make the game completely unplayable but oh boy you're gonna have the [ __ ] irritated out of you remember how I mentioned that games can make you want to stab well if the team games haven't made you want to stab yet try some of these problems and see how you do this isn't one major problem but a death by a thousand tiny Cuts let's say you want to play a game with your friends well full guys allows you to queue into a game with a party of up to four players that's a very limited size for a game that allows 60 players in a game but it's still better than nothing although Nothing by which I mean none of your party is what you'll often get as you'll queue into a game start playing and then find that the rest of your party has been booted out for no reason the group that you try to queue into a game with has been split up by the game's matchmaking so you pull out of the game it's put you in right except when a game is being selected loading or starting you're not allowed to leave pressing escape to leave game just doesn't work when the game is doing any of those things so you're gonna have to wait wait just long enough to annoy you until the game actually lets you leave reminder that in this case you're only leaving because the game wasn't working properly although this happens in every game if you get eliminated before the final and want to leave but once you finish waiting you can pull out reassemble your party and cure into another game hoping they don't get booted again there's a strong chance they will though but hey we're actually in a game now [ __ ] hell what's that noise it ever all instances it's a soundtrack playing all at once an issue that you have entire game to fix oh boy how fun okay so now that you're in a game hang on what the [ __ ] just happened there oh people are flying across the map that one goes maybe he's going to find higher quality footage what the [ __ ] can they just hover off of the map so they can never get caught yeah I just saw a guy take off into the sky all right let's go what the [ __ ] uh did you see the guy that just [ __ ] catapulted himself all the way to the top all right yeah crap oh see you see the [ __ ] ninja over there look at him look I'm [ __ ] fussing going uh whoa that looks no he couldn't get there so fast oh it's the pink the pink and yeah did you see that look look at that [ __ ] oh my God oh my God why are you why but like if they get the hexagon what the [ __ ] that's what I mean like yeah we'll we'll erase the bottom tiles like why would that matter you can fly look at this look at this [ __ ] you need to end this video saying fix your [ __ ] what a dessert you in that Crown buddy Ah that's not good is it players running around left and right with hacked clients a player having the ability to fly pretty much guarantees them the win which isn't very fair do you think you're done with waiting unnecessarily well you probably are but if you get the Slime race mini game in which players are knocked out if they get caught by the slowly Rising Lake of slime then it just takes one of the up to 34 surviving players to decide I'm gonna be a little slippery piece of [ __ ] and just wait to cross the finish line until the game forces them to just watch this clip in which no more players are currently competing in the race the only remaining players are just standing in front of the Finish Line as all the other players in the lobby are just forced to wait and watch I think I'll just uh quickly check my Twitter notifications here ah hmm yes the world is [ __ ] my stuck to be waiting for this huh oh here comes the Slime it's time to leave what happens with that texture it was as I was watching a couple of players shoot across the map while listening to three separate instances of the game's soundtrack that I first started to think I don't think this game is very well polished but of course these are just the Polish issues the things that are most likely to get ironed out let's get back to the game when it's actually all working as intended how's the game when you don't randomly fall through the floor causing you to lose on the final round we've covered the team games let's cover the free-for-all games as I've said some of them are great but some of them not so much the free-for-all games already have a leg up on the team games you don't get assigned a random team halfway through your free-for-all experience from the off then the free-for-all games have the scope to be much more fair than the team games we've already discussed and for the most part they are although being fair really isn't everything let's start with a category of free-for-all games that are fine but really could use some work I call these the slow games and in this category I'm counting block party roll out and that's what I'm calling the memory game I have to decided and you're not going to change my mind on this all of these games share the same objective and that is don't fall in the pool of pink goo words to live by actually roll out is a series of rotating platforms with holes and obstacles on them fall through one of the holes into the pink goo and you're eliminated from the game block party sees players standing on a small platform as blocks move towards them trying to push them off if you get pushed off you're in the pink goo and you're eliminated there's a memory game in which you stand on different tiles that display different symbols symbols are then hidden and you're shown one of them on a screen at the front of the game all of the platforms that weren't displaying that symbol will then disappear and if you're standing on one of them you'll fall in the pink goo and you guessed it be eliminated from the game the only real way that you can make a mistake on these minigames is a way in which it kills you unlike the races that you get in round one slip up once here and you're completely out of the running because the penalty for slipping up is now so much worse the game has to compensate by making it much harder to slip up in the first place these aren't mini games where you're expected to make several mistakes and therefore have the ability to recover these are mini games where if you make one single mistake you you're completely out of the race so for balance they're much easier mistakes to avoid look at the clip I showed of me dying here you don't see this mistake and think ah well that was a tricky obstacle you see this mistake and think why did you walk in the hole [ __ ] and that's how it feels to lose on any of these rounds the obstacles aren't challenging if you get eliminated here it's most likely because you had a brain fart just walk in the right place and jump occasionally and you'll survive block party just walk to where there's land and you'll survive roll out just have a very basic memory and you'll survive or failing that just [ __ ] look where everyone else is going and you'll survive when the penalty for falling in the pink goo is total elimination from the game it should be a hard mistake to make that makes sense the problem is how they've gone about it these games are just a leisurely stroll really the only times I've really been eliminated on games like roll out are times in which I haven't really been paying attention when it's this easy to survive the task of not dying isn't particularly engaging funnily enough though I have already mentioned in many a game that gets the same system right a mini game where if you fall in the goo you get eliminated the [ __ ] slime race you have to race up the course and the goo will slowly rise behind you if you fall in it you're eliminated the difference here though is that you don't have to make one big mistake to fall in the goo It's a combination of lots of little mistakes that slow you down enough that it catches up with you as a result of there being more room for the player to make mistakes the obstacles can be more challenging while still being fair you could fix the other slow games by doing something similar if when you were knocked off of the platform on block party you simply fell onto a lower platform that was nearer the goo then the obstacles could be increased in difficulty without making the minigame itself too challenging I really think a multi-tiered platform would be the way to go here just get rid of the memory game though I don't I don't think anyone will miss it aside from those games we also have the free-for-all version of tail tag while I do really like tail tag It suffers from the design flaw that most of the game is pointless you qualify for the next round or are eliminated based on whether or not you have a tail at the end of the round so you can probably just chill out for the first half of the game without really affecting your prospects of winning too much and consider this it may feel great to grab someone else's tail right at the last second so you qualify and they don't but it really really doesn't feel great to be the person getting their tail grabbed at the last second you could have been skillfully keeping a hold of your tail the whole game only to lose to that I'd suggest reworking the scoring system so it's based on how long you had a tail while you have a tail you gain points and while you don't have one you don't that way the scores would be much more representative of a player's skill rather than whether or not they just happen to have a tail at the end of the game this would give an unfair advantage to players that start with Tails so to fix that I'd suggest instead of having players start with tails at all Tails start on the ground on the map and players have to pick them up there's one free-for-all mid-game minigame left that we haven't mentioned yet and it's not very good in tiptoe players are presented with a board of tiles and have to find their way from one end to the other most tiles will fall away when stepped on but some of them will remain steady you won't be able to tell whether a tile is real or fake until you step on it the first 12 people to the other side will follow for the next round and everyone else will be eliminated and the strategy for this game is um stand behind whoever's winning if you actually go ahead and test the tiles to see whether they're real there's a good chance that you'll fall off the map the dominant strategy here is to wait a while whatever you do don't persevere wait for other people to figure out the route and just follow them stepping up to the actual Challenge and taking risks in this game is a stupid thing to do because once you've fallen off the map all you've done is help all of your opponents showing other players the way while putting yourself at a disadvantage because you have to respawn this is a mini game designed to punish the first person to get bored of playing it safe the game Pummel party actually has a mini game very similar to this one but without the design flaws in pubble party's version the correct path remains invisible even once it's been found but the game occasionally and very briefly reveals the whole path to all the players this is far superior because you're not punished for going first and persevering if you take a risk your success or failure won't be based on dumb luck hope turns out that title I jumped on wasn't the correct path there was no way I could possibly have known that but instead your success is based on how well you remember the path that you've already seen it's a skill base game rather than a random [ __ ] and with that the only mini games we have left to talk about are the ones you get in the final round I know they're planning on adding more but at the time of recording there are three mini games you can get as the find one of them is free-for-all tail tag but with only one winner and we've already covered the strengths and failings of that game although when there's only one tail it does seem even more arbitrary to score it based on who has the tail at the end of the game because everyone's going for the same tale It's Gonna Change hands every 5 seconds so the winner is basically whoever happens to have the tail when the timer runs out skill is still a factor but there's a lot more Randomness than is ideal the player who manages to finish with the tail was skilled enough to grab it and hold on to it for a while but so were most of the players in the game if you're the very best player at catching the tail and keeping a hold of it when you have it you're favored but you could still lose quite arbitrarily this is a game that I won despite another player having the tail for most of the round this is the case where I'd suggest the same fixes that I suggested to the regular tail tag while tail tag in the finale is fun it's not a perfect game to decide to win it feels really bad to get all the way to that final round and then lose not because you performed worse than the game overall but instead because you happen to be losing at a rather random point in time it's fun if you like that sort of thing but not very fair to fix this one I'd honestly just suggest the same changes I suggested to the regular version of free-for-all tail tag the second event you might get as a final is Fall Mountain where players compete to complete a wacky obstacle course this is the kind of thing that the game excels at right Wacky Races through obstacle courses well yes but this specific one really shouldn't be a fine in the races that you get in round one you just have to finish faster than a lot of other players in the game but because four mountain is picking a final winner you lose unless you finish first place making a mistake on an obstacle still just slows you down slightly but because of the more Cutthroat nature that comes hand in hand with needing to get first in this game that means you've probably lost now of course the final is gonna be more Cutthroat than round one that's not a problem at all what is a problem though is how the obstacles on this level are designed the main obstacle comes in the form of Five camera ends at the top of the map that shoot giant balls at you as you try to progress this is far too random for a game that's lost by you making a single mistake get worse than average luck with the balls and you're cheated out of your win on the final round you don't even have to make a mistake and it's over for you you spend all that time getting to the last round and the winner is whoever happens to get punt at least in a maze of hectic [ __ ] it's a fun game but it's poorly designed to be a final the last mini game you can get as a final is called hexagon and I'm not critical of this one at all I think it's really well designed if you're familiar with spleeth in Minecraft you know exactly what this game is you run across tiles and when you step on one it disappears there are several layers like this and if you fall off the bottom layer you're out this is completely fair and completely skill based on top of that a single mistake doesn't lock you out of the game the multiple layers mean to get knocked out of this one you have to make several mistakes but the fact that the remaining safe places to stand are ever shrinking means that this game can't go on for too long if you're good enough you can also mess with other players by cutting them off while trying to avoid getting cut off yourself they is a perfect competitive experience to end a round of fall guys it's a shame that two times out of three you'll get one of the other ones and that's it that's what full guys mini games are like there are good ones most of which you'll encounter in the early game but there are plenty of bad ones too and since each game of four guys goes several rounds you probably won't get a game where you don't encounter some of the bad ones Fall Guys is a great base a great starting point for what could be an amazing game unfortunately though every time you play it you'll encounter at least some degree of [ __ ] if not a lot of [ __ ] I really hope it's clear that my criticism comes from a place of love I really want to see this game improved because I really enjoy playing it and wish it didn't have these huge problems so that I could have more fun doing so but that's everything I really hope you've enjoyed before I go I would just like to thank mola and metal Commander for capturing most of the footage you saw in this video my budget PC wasn't quite up to capturing the footage so I needed it the pretty unicorn you've been seeing for most of this video wasn't in fact me it was Marla I may refer to the unicorners I a couple of times but that was only to make the video clearer it was actually him look at the clip I showed of me dying here you don't see this mistake and think ah well that was a tricky obstacle you see this mistake and think why did you walk in the hole dip [ __ ] but that's me for today a goodbye [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jay Exci

Views: 522,104

Keywords: fall guys, fall guys: ultimate knockout, analysis, review, critique

Id: kuFeupqxgRw

Length: 27min 15sec (1635 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

Thanks for posting to /r/CinemaSinsSins! Make sure to be civil and remember the human. Please read our rules and make sure to flair your post.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/SupremeLeaderShmalex]

...

This one’s gonna cause a bit of a stir, isn’t it?

[u/CrazyWazy55]

yeah lol, that's why it's so fun