Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout – Joab Reviews Every Level In The Game
As discussed in Episode 528, in lieu of a more formal review (which I am incapable of doing because I am too sweaty at my core) I present you with a review of every single level in Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. Or at least all the ones I’ve played.
See Saw
Anyone who has ever had a job already intimately understands See Saw, because you see See Saw in every facet of modern corporate culture. On one hand you have your hopes, your dreams, your desires to do your best work. And on the other hand you have the shiftless layabouts who have somehow qualified as your coworkers, your peers, all of them unknowingly doing their best to drag you under with them. How do you win? There’s no winning in See Saw, only the vague concept of separating from the pack and staying execution, a frantic effort to tread water long enough to remain above the surface while your colleagues clamber at your legs below and the sharks begin to circle up top. 7/10
Hit Parade
Allegory for the wonder of insemination, you and your spermatozoa companions rush through the spinning dials of the prostate, clutter through the narrowest exit of the urethra, dodge the giant swinging testicles and then slimily ejaculate across the finish line, destined to be discarded in a tissue. All in under a minute. 7/10
Door Dash
In July 2019 it was revealed that popular food delivery service DoorDash had been swindling its ‘independent contractors’ out of their tips. When a customer added a tip, instead of it going to the driver it was paid directly to the company, who used that tip money to pay the driver their guaranteed minimum delivery fee before pocketing the rest. DoorDash claimed it had rectified this behaviour but it continued to do this for months after being found out. It’s a fun mode though. 7/10
Tip Toe
In the best Indiana Jones film — THE BEST ONE — Doctor Henry Jones Junior (Indiana wash the dog’sh name) is presented with a superficially simple challenge — walk across a hall littered with lettered titles. He quickly finds out that if one steps on the wrong tiles, they will fall to their death. To work out which tiles to step on, he needs to spell out the true name of god. Tip Toe involves zero spelling — instead you shove other racers onto the tiles in front and laugh as they plummet. How did they get back out of the grail room in that movie? They just sort of show up next to a dying Sean Connery? 7/10
The Whirlygig
The quixotic struggle at the heart of Fall Guys is never more apparent than in THE WHIRLYGIG, wherein you literally tilt at windmills on your arduous journey across a world rendered mad, filled with spiteful assholes who desire nothing more than to laugh at your misfortune. To me The Whirlygig fixes Cervantes’ greatest error — you never recover your sanity. 7/10
Hoarders
The Dark Souls of Hungry Hungry Hippos games. 7/10
The Dark Souls of Hungry Hungry Hippos games.
Slime Climb
What happens to the Fall Guys when they drown in slime? Every other time they perish they seem to come back just fine, even from what would appear to be fatal falls, but if they get swallowed by the pink sludge they are never seen again. Is it their kryptonite? 7/10
Hoopsie Daisy
Finally a game is bold enough to ask the question outright — if we told you to literally jump through hoops, how many hoops would you jump through? How many could you jump through. Me? I could jump through dozens. I’m amazing at it. Unfortunately I’m exclusively teamed with people who see through the pretense and refuse to jump through anything at all. 7/10
Fruit Chute
I had a dream once where I trapped five year olds on a treadmill and then pelted them with fruit salad. At the time I couldn’t have known that it was actually a nightmare (although the kids crying the whole time should have been a clue). 7/10
Jump Club
A bar rotates around a pole like a two dimensional dancer rendered in three dimensional space. All you need to do is leap over the bar each time it comes around. How anyone ever dies in this mode is beyond me. 7/10
Tail Tag
Time means nothing. It is a human construct, used by cavemen to explain why it’s dark sometimes and bright at others. And few games demonstrate the fallibility of our interpretation of the fourth dimension as well as TAIL TAG. There is, allowing for around .2 seconds of variance, only 300 milliseconds that matter in any given game of TAIL TAG. The other two minutes, twenty nine seconds and seven hundred milliseconds exist to give you ample time to reflect on the many ways in which you have frittered away fleeting opportunities on this planet — chances not taken, creative seeds unsown, risks packed away in board game cupboards. 7/10
Roll Out
It doesn’t matter how fast you run, your best efforts will see to it that you only ever remain in one place. Worse, the people beside you, trapped in this hell as well, will actively do their best to trip you up instead of focusing their attention and anger on the people who created this nightmare for you all. 7/10
Block Party
You don’t “win” Block Party. You simply survive. Stay focused for long enough and you will make it through to the next round along with every other person capable of staving off distraction for not quite three minutes. This is easier said than done. 7/10
Perfect Match
The best part was when my wife walked in on me sitting hunched forward in front of my computer chanting “Banana Orange Mango Grape Watermelon” like a Stepford wife trying to remember the ingredients for her breakfast smoothie while she copy pastes a message onto her Facebook wall about how Mark Zuckerburg is going to delete all her photos. Like her, I too think it would be better with vodka. 7/10
Hex-A-Gone
Just when you think the rug has been pulled out from underneath you for the last time, Hex-A-Gone comes along and pulls it out again. 7/10
Dizzy Heights
I grew up on a farm that, following quite a long walk, backed onto the Logan River. Millenia of the river banks breaking resulted in a broad, steep hill between the back of the farm and the riverbed itself. It was a 65ish degree decline over 15 to 20 metres. Getting down to the river itself had been simplified thanks to a graded slope cut into the hillside, cut to make it easy for a tractor to make its way down to the water. Being young and dumb my brothers and I would hop into a 40 Gallon Blue Plastic drum and shove each other down the tractor path. One time, for a goof, my brothers shoved me down the steep side of the hill instead. The only thing that stopped me from crashing into the water was the stinging nettle thicket that it landed in. When I came to, a spider was crawling into the barrel. 7/10
Rock N Roll
Growing up playing soccer and earning more than a few red cards, the mantra I heard the most from my coaches was “Play the ball, not the player.” That spirit lives on in Rock N Roll with one catch — they never specify which ball. 7/10
Egg Scramble
The Formosa Kukri Snake of Eastern Asia is not venomous, its venom glands having atrophied thanks to a lifetime of stealing and then eating the eggs of nearby prey. It is an opportunist that targets only the most vulnerable, and more often than not it goes unopposed in its efforts to steal that which doesn’t belong to it. Only the long-tailed sun skink will aggressively defend its nest against the invader. Some days I am the snake. Some days I am the skink. 7/10
Jinxed
A common ‘Infected’ game mode but you can’t release a game for children with an Infected game mode in the midst of a global pandemic. 7/10
Fall Mountain
The race up Fall Mountain is short and pointless. Spinning turnstiles and giant boulders give way to hammers and weird little ledges my character can’t seem to ever jump up on his first attempt, and then right at the top sits a crown that I have never ever, ever, ever reached before one of the other jerks playing in my session. 7/10
Gate Crash
As the Mongol Empire rampaged across Asia Europe in the 13th and 14th Centuries, they presented their enemies with a simple choice. Surrender and pay tribute to the ever-growing empire, or die. Too many city-states chose the latter, opting to defend their castle walls against the Mongol hordes in a futile effort to resist. When the Mongols crashed the gates — and barring any divine wind, this was an inevitability — they would kill every living thing within and then raze the buildings to the ground. According to some studies, the razing of these castles and the surrounding villages may have allowed enough trees to grow to stave off climate change related annihilation for a single year. 7/10
Fall Ball
If FIFA 21 implemented an Under 5’s community soccer mode it would look like Fall Ball. No communication, no ball-handling skill, no real strategy beyond the nebulous, intangible desire to win, watching Fall Ball is identical to watching the Knicks play as a fan of basketball. And when your team is terrible, playing Fall Ball is identical to watching the Knicks play as a fan of the Knicks. 10/10
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