Gang Beast
Odina Conkright
Gang Beasts is a silly multiplayer party game with surly gelatinous characters, brutal slapstick fight sequences, and absurd hazardous environments, set in the mean streets of Beef City.
Customise your character and fight local and online enemies in the melee game mode or fight with friends against the gangs of Beef City in the gang game mode.
Gang Beasts is made by Boneloaf, a small independent game studio making a series of experimental multiplayer party games.
Nintendo Switch Online membership (sold separately) and Nintendo Account required for online play. Not available in all countries. Internet access required for online features. Terms apply. nintendo.com/switch-online
There's a folder on my PlayStation 4 that's reserved for the really good stuff. It's where Towerfall Ascension sits alongside Nidhogg and the brilliant compilation that is Sportsfriends. It's where I head when friends are around, when I want a guaranteed good time, and ever since creating it there's been a little slot reserved for Gang Beasts, that party game par excellence. I've been waiting on it a fairly long time.
You've already played Gang Beasts, I'm sure. Whether that's at one of the many game events where it's been a fixture since 2014, where you'd follow the sound of laughter until you found four people huddled around a monitor knocking merry hell out of one another. Maybe you've already got it on PC where it's been out in Early Access for a good few years. You likely know the deal already; pissed-up jelly babies go at each other across a series of stages until only one stands as the winner.
Now it's finally out on PlayStation 4, familiarity hasn't really dimmed its brilliance. Played with friends, Gang Beasts is a drunken hug of a game in which you're fighting the controls as much as you are each other. You're never really in charge of a fight in Gang Beasts - don't expect this particular fighting game to turn up at EVO, or to be the subject of in-depth YouTube tutorials - and instead my only advice is that you give yourself over to its chaos.
Seeing what Gang Beasts unwieldy physics come up with is most of the fun, doubled by a series of levels with Machiavellian twists and cruel surprises. Fight atop a blimp that's high in the heavens and toss your opponents into the oblivion below; have a skirmish in a factory where an angry maw of spinning metal waits to devour anyone with their guard down. It's an incredibly violent game, but that's always going to be the case in something that's pure unabashed slapstick.
A problem with slapstick, though, is that it can often lack substance, and beyond the belly laughs and acts of blunt savagery there's really not that much to Gang Beasts. Coming back to it some three years after first playing it on the show floor at EGX - where myself and just about anyone who encountered fell dizzily in love with this raucous little gem - there's not that much more to it all, even if developer Boneloaf has made some valiant efforts to pad it all out.
There's a waves mode in which you partner up with other players to take on AI combatants - a nice little throwback, in part, to classics such as Streets of Rage and Final Fight which Boneloaf is in thrall to - as well as a football mode that's shockingly faithful to playground play-offs in its clumsy violence. They're cute distractions but are ultimately one-shot attractions.
There's online play too, though it's shabbily implemented. As, really, is much of Gang Beasts - muddle through its front-end and you'd be forgiven for wondering whether this truly has left Early Access or not, and there's something darkly amusing about how, on PC at least, a whole suite of new issues have arisen as Gang Beasts finally makes its way to 1.0. Between tweaks to the camera and physics to performance issues, this game is a mess.
Perhaps that scrappiness is inevitable in a game as wilfully scruffy as this, and it's certainly thematically apt. It doesn't really dull the charm of getting a gang of friends around and knocking each other about for a round or two before you might move on to something with a little more substance, and the thrill of this punchy little game remains intact despite its numerous problems.
Gang Beasts is far from perfect, then; it's all a little too messy for its own good, and it's still a super slight package despite its extended stay in Early Access. That spark is still there, though, and this remains a uniquely boisterous party game that's well worth having on tap. It's earned its place - just - with those other modern multiplayer classics, even if it doesn't quite have their class.
A lot of my friends from school have done things like have children or move to other countries now, but in the wilderness years of 2010-2016 we still all returned to our home town every Christmas, primarily to see our families, but also, secondarily, to get absolutely destroyed on Christmas eve.
A tertiary reason was that my friend Tim, who has now both had a child and moved to another country, would have an annual Christmas LAN party at his house. There were a few games that cropped up at these. When Gang Beasts first appeared, around 2014 or so, it entered heavy rotation.
We, a group of sill very obnoxious 20 somethings, huddled around two electric heaters in a cinder-block storage room abutting Tim's house, and only came inside to eat the huge takeaway we ordered. It was very cold, and Gang Beasts was my favourite game to play because it took all our minds off that. The lads all liked playing 4X games so they could throw armies against each other, but with Gang Beasts we could all crowd around one screen, and laugh and hoot and screech and stamp our feet.
In Gang Beasts everyone is a blob person of a different, bright colour. Sort of a cross between Morph off of Take Hart/Morph and Flubber off of Flubber. You control each arm independently, and can make them grab and hold onto something - practically anything, in fact. If you get the knack, you can monkey up a wall, one arm swing at a time. You can also flail and punch. The objective is to be the last beast standing. The battlegrounds are creative, so our enemies can be thrown into fire pits, or into the sea, or dropped from atop a moving truck.
It is a furious dance. Punch an opponent enough, and you can knock them to the ground, leaving them helpless, but punch too much and you might also tire yourself out. If someone wellies you off an edge, you can grab onto them as you fall, taking them with you - or they might decide to sacrifice themselves, in the hope that your death registers first. One time, Geoff climbed up a wall and stuck there in a corner, while everyone forgot about him, and waited until Tim was the only other person left. He leapt from the wall like a gelatinous batman.
Gang Beasts leads to many Indiana Jones style life-or-death fights taking place on the edge of furnaces, or on top of a moving big wheel, and it remains probably the best couch game I have played for years.
Gang Beasts is one of the lightest and most fun brawling games out there. There are no character tiers or complex combos, most people who play it will never go any deeper with their offense than spamming attacks and occasionally getting some good lifts. What's great about Gang Beasts moves is that style of playing is loads of fun and gives players a fair chance against each other regardless of how their skills match up.
For those who wish to dive deeper, Gang Beasts' combat offers a lot of complex moves and tricks to give an advantage. Unlike most special moves in fighting games, these started life as mere accidents in development like the consequences of the basic movement controls, but as the game evolved, the developers leaned into them to create some interesting opportunities.
One of the most frustrating things in Gang Beasts is being unable to escape an opponent who is dead-set on never letting go. It's not necessarily a death sentence to get into an inescapable hold, though, and the game offers multiple effective ways to break out.
Sometimes the player is the one who doesn't want to let go as their opponent might be trying to throw them off the side of the stage. In that case, many of these tactics still work effectively because of the extremely close range and ability to reposition oneself.
One of the easiest (and perhaps most intuitive) ways to break free of a neverending hold is to rapidly press the jump button. It's not a guaranteed escape, and there's no perfect way to do it, but leaning in different directions and continually pulling away should eventually force the opponent to let go, giving you a second to reposition and get the upper hand.
A great move to pull on close-range enemies, like those who are holding you close, is to headbutt them instead of punch. Different controllers have different inputs for the headbutt so be sure to learn which button this is in your setup to easily escape from a hold. Sometimes, this will knock out the enemy for a few seconds too, making it one of the most useful Gang Beasts special moves.
Sometimes the enemy just won't let go, especially enemies that are trying to avoid being thrown off of a ledge. It's frustrating to have a foe holding onto the player with just as strong a grip, but there are ways around this. Don't take both hands off of the opponent, instead go one hand at a time to grab them by a part of their body that they can't reach you back from, such as on their legs or lower torso.
The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction is far from a new one - coined all the way back at the beginning of the Nuclear era, M.A.D. is both a defensive and an offensive concept in total war. In Gang Beasts, a decent strategy against a much better player is to take them down with you. It will result in a tie, and there's a chance that the next map might be more in your favor.
Simply jump off the edge with a foe attached (or let go of the ledge), and you will both lose, then continue to the next map. While it's not a great way to win a round, it's a great way to demoralize and frustrate the opponent, and the best way to avoid an incoming loss.
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