Gang Beasts' madcap brawling creates a dynamic alliance between conflict and chaos. It also enables human responses like surprise, merriment, revenge, and screaming. Driving a wobbly creature to comically murder another flailing mess, as it turns out, is a pleasant and repeatable practice. If only three of your friends could always come along for the ride.
Melt down an action figure to its primordial goo. Shape the wreckage into an anthropomorphic body, and somehow keep the limited points of articulation. Insert it into a dangerous arena with three companion abominations. Inspire it with the instinct to live and the will to destroy. Add a silly hat. The eventual product is Gang Beasts, a multiplayer brawler more interested in coddling chaos than honing control.
Obfuscating control in the pursuit of creative anarchy is a proven, if not decaying, approach to game design. Surgeon Simulator, Octodad, and Job Simulator pleased a remote audience as well as they entertained a local player, but this trend felt stale by the time the wrapping came off I am Bread. Gang Beasts, which was first released to early access in 2014 at the peak of this phenomenon, seeks to apply this principle to an arena-based fighting game.
Tapping the left and right shoulder button issues a left or right punch. Holding down the same shoulder button turns your arm into glue. Pushing the X button jumps, but only when the button is released. Circle and Square are responsible for ducking and a half-assed kick, respectively. Triangle lifts a held object (almost always another player) above your head. For some reason, double tapping circle deploys a vicious head-butt. These are the primitive instruments in which Gang Beasts allows its players to orchestrate comic pandemonium.
Certainly, a more intuitive control system could have been developed. Of equal certainty is the negative impact it would have had on Gang Beasts’ performance. It’s sloppy by design and stupid by necessity, creating a volatile mixture of artistry and luck perfected to match Gang Beasts’ maniac aesthetic. It’s a bunch of goofy blob people fighting each other, a post-modern version of Bum Fights where no one actually gets hurt and empathy isn’t sacrificed in the agreement.
The absence of a normal control model does not preclude the development and application of skill. Either a properly cocked punch or a fierce head-butt can knock an opponent out cold. This creates a small window of time to pick an opponent up and use your momentum to hurl them out of the arena and win the match. Inevitably, said opponent always comes to life at the last second and clings to life in a mad scramble. Watching someone either pull themselves out of a meat grinder or dangle below a moving truck reflects panic and desperation on both sides of the equation. You can never count someone out, often in spite of the effort on either side.
Gang Beasts’ collection of levels present different angles to explore its potential. A wrestling ring is the vanilla layout, with similar low-stress options on a rooftop or on the catwalk of a roadside billboard. These are opportune places to learn and practice the basics. Soon you can move onto two opposing elevators, the aforementioned area loaded with meat grinders, one with a fan contraption that throws players into the sky, and another with two trucks moving down a highway. Fighting (or taking advantage of) the environment is as important to survival as trying not to receive a concussion.
Then there’s the Ferris wheel level, which, in our experience, created an exhibition closer to performance art than open fighting. Each player begins the match in a different car, and the challenge is supposed to lie in finding a safe way to navigate to another player’s car. By hanging onto the Ferris wheel’s spokes, we ended up using Gang Beasts’ physics system to break the cars off the wheel and create a dangerously unstable playing field. From there almost nothing happened on purpose, leaving the rules of death and victory open to a personal belief system. Making a dangerous mess and somehow finding a way out was a thrill on par with any of 2017’s most valuable gaming moments.
Combining three friends with three hours of Gang Beasts quantitatively provided one of the best multiplayer experiences I have ever had. It’s in the company of Sportsfriends, Nidhogg, and Samurai Gun of straightforward games tuned for parties and focused gatherings. It looks so damn stupid, and its basic operation narrows the gap between novice and professional. In our session, Gang Beasts produced a density of laughter and screaming not present in many other four-player (or two teamed) competitions. When all of its pieces are aligned, Gang Beasts beliefs are almost impossible to doubt.
Despite officially leaving early access, however, Gang Beasts is still kind of a mess. The PlayStation 4 version drops frames at a rapid pace and crawls any time glass is shattered. Sometimes the camera either has no idea where to focus the action or can’t see through a massive object in the environment. The suspicion that the whole damn thing is about to break is somehow consistent with Gang Beasts’ precarious aesthetic but, technically, these are actual problems and not part of the ride.
A more consequential failure lies with Gang Beasts’ network performance. Despite trying four times a day over the last week, I was never able to match into an online game. It could never find a server, and for some reason it wouldn’t let me make my own custom game either. Usually these kind of issues happen around launch but Gang Beasts’ performance refused to show any signs of life. This troubling for a game that’s also razor thin in options and focused on a very specific idea (I also don’t think online battles are an ideal way to experience Gang Beasts, but if the option is there it should probably work).
Multiplayer brawling is the core of Gang Beasts, but it does try to stretch it legs elsewhere. Waves mode throws hoards of AI opponents at human players and is mostly bad. Soccer mode applies Gang Beasts controls to booting around a soccer ball on a small field in a timed match. While soccer technically works, it was also something I played once and never wanted to play again. These feel like sideshows created to pad Gang Beasts’ “content,” and feel incongruous to its delightful main attraction.
It’s hard to care about Gang Beasts’ limitations. I’m not bothered by non-existent tutorials, the lack of a coherent single player option, and disastrous technical issues. I also don’t try to use scissors to change a light bulb or substitute gasoline for vegetable oil. Gang Beasts’ ability to simultaneously entertain four human beings and consistently pull laughter from cartoon violence is more valuable than any of its perceived shortcomings. When used as designed, Gang Beasts can make a fire anywhere you try to start it.
