Chaotic, laggy slapstick fun is the best way to describe Gang Beasts. We’ve been hearing about it and playing it ever since 2014 but it got out of Early Access at the end of 2017 and finally released on Steam and the PlayStation 4.
Gang Beasts is a free for all brawler game. You are pitted against a bunch of other people in a “King of the Hill” type match where the last player alive wins the round. The game is nothing special in terms of graphics with some customization options when picking your character but that’s about it, more about that later on though.
Gang Beasts’ bread and butter is the co-op multiplayer. You fight your friends and the controls in Free For All match. The somewhat stiff controls and physics of the game result in a lot of hilarious and unforeseen situations. Sometimes a player might just get launched up into the air, sometimes they can miraculously climb back onto the platform for a comeback victory and sometimes you can just hit your own self and knock yourself out. It is extremely fun especially with the various maps. The maps range from a subway station, to moving trucks with billboards as obstacles and even a flying blimp.
The character customization is another aspect of the game where you can have fun and give some personality to your character. You dress up as a chicken, as a working man heck, even as something that resembles Pikachu. Have you ever had that feeling where you wanted to dress in a Pink Dinosaur onsie? Well guess what, you can do it. There’s plenty more awesome customization options to choose from and even mutliple colours to differentiate between you and your friends.
The game also features an online multiplayer mode but it is implemented quite shabbily. It can be quite broken and laggy to play which can be very, very frustrating. There’s also a horde mode where you fight off against waves of enemies, it isn’t that fun because of how the controls are. Lastly, there’s a football mode to play football with your friends and is not that bad but can get boring soon.
The most glaring issue with the game is the fact that it’s a party game and playing it in single player or offline is just not fun. It’s had the same basic modes and features since the time it has been on Early Access with a few updates to add a bit of content and maps. The performance has also degraded lately with the newer patches which is weird to say but has been the case as reported by a lot of users.
Gang Beasts is an extremely fun party game to play with friends or family. The absolute chaos that is created is beautiful and has left me with a lot of fantastic memories however, for the singleplayer and online mode, the game falls short but not only that, the game is truly meant to be played as a couch co-op game. The lack of further content after all this time is also quite disappointing to see. I would only recommend this game if you plan on playing with your friends.
Gang Beasts is out for the PC, Mac, Linux and the PlayStation 4 for $20.
