Newest battle royale ditches guns and soldiers for costumed jelly beans
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockdown proves you don't need to copy trends to make a successful game. Who would've thought that even the tiniest amount of originality can surpass formulaic and tired designs? Developers Mediatonic knew this and proved to the world that it's always better to defy trends than follow them.
Within a week of releasing, Fall Guys sold over 2 million copies on Steam alone. The PlayStation 4 sales numbers are still a mystery. Still, judging from the 15.6 million total users, it's safe to assume Fall Guys performed just as well on PS4.
The number of regular players on PlayStation 4 is hard to gauge. Over 15 million people have the game, but that doesn't mean 15 million people play it. Steam is different, though. According to steamcharts.com, Fall Guys is the third most played game with 150,000 concurrent players. It sits just above PUBG and just below Dota 2.
Twitch is a decent metric to measure a game's popularity when sales figures are hard to come by. Like Nielson-ratings and TV, you can get a pretty good idea of what's hot just by looking at what people are watching.
At the time of writing, Fall Guys is the second-most-watched game on Twitch with around 303,000 viewers. To put that into perspective, Grand Theft Auto V is the third-most watched with about 187,000 viewers. Fortnite trails just behind with 175,000 viewers.
Technically, Fall Guys is a battle royal, but it doesn't follow any of the genre's "rules." Most battle royale games are first-person-shooters centered around solo players or small teams killing each other until only one remains.
In Fall Guys, players race each other through a gauntlet of obstacle courses where survival depends on speed, timing, and overcoming your character's lack of fine motor skills. Your character is a walking jelly-bean, not a "hyper athletic Ninja Warrior," according to the Mediatonic.
There are no guns. There is no shooting. There are no shields, loadouts, med kits, or grenades. You don't drop from a plane or bus, and a wall of death doesn't corral you into a tiny circle. This isn't Call of Duty, it's "slap-stick, physics-based, knockout-style chaos."
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is available now for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows.
