Gang Beasts Early Access review

[Administrator]

According to the Gang Beasts website, developer Boneloaf originally sought to create the spiritual descendant of scrolling beat-'em-ups like Final Fight, Streets of Rage and Golden Axe. Having grown up with those games, they strike me as excellent things from which to spiritually descend. However, playing Gang Beasts in its Early Access form does not remind me of the many happy hours I spent in the company of Cody, Haggar, Axel and that one guy who looked like Conan. Gang Beasts is more like the after-party at a Jeremy Kyle taping, watching 50-year-old alcoholics groping their way through a fight where successful acts of aggression are less important than the basic ability to prop oneself up.
None of this is a bad thing, at least to begin with. You and up to seven other players each control an angry little pillow of jelly (I'm talking about Gang Beasts now, even though the Jeremy Kyle thing still works) and your job is to overcome your adversaries by pummelling them with your mighty fists and then disposing of them in one of the many hazards that fill out each distinctive stage. You generally do this by putting your enemy into a brief KO state and then hoisting them above your head and throwing them into an abyss, or through the jaws of industrial machinery where they can be squeezed into oblivion. (There's no gore to speak of - it's usually like watching someone steamroller a hacky sack.)
This would probably be fun anyway, but the thing that elbows Gang Beasts out of the fighting game genre and into the party game pile is the controls, which by any objective measure are rubbish. Gloriously rubbish. You have individual control of your hands, which you can wave around to jab at other players, and by holding instead of mashing the punch buttons you can grip onto things. Another button lets you raise your arms above your head like Daniel in The Karate Kid. Another flops you down on the ground. And everything is sloppy and lagged as though the programmers are slurring their code, meaning that even the most basic offensive strategies are mangled by imprecision, leaving you to wheel around groping for whatever cack-handed opportunism can save the day.
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