Fall Guys being free is a good excuse to get back into Fall Guys

destructoid.com:

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is free-to-play now, for close to a week. Over the last weekend, I spent hours getting back in; acclimating to the new model, browsing the new rewards, and marveling at all that’s changed since I dropped off. And despite some early wrinkles, I can’t really deny it. It’s a good time to be back into Fall Guys.

It’s almost impossible for me to divorce Fall Guys from the moment when it launched. It was the first summer of the pandemic, and with everyone inside and socially distanced, Fall Guys was a welcome reprieve. Much like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it became a forum for social interaction. But that’s not to say Fall Guys wasn’t good on its own merits, either.

What Fall Guys really nailed then, and still does so now, is the chaotic game show feel. The moment when you start up a new show and 60 players are standing in a massive block, waiting to hurl themselves face-forward through an obstacle course or race track. Shows like Wipeout and Takeshi’s Castle (MXC, for Spike viewers) are all about this chaos. Getting it in video game form, however, is a little tougher.

It’s not just the multiple players careening down the same course. It’s the physicality of it. The way everyone bumps into each other. How a bean totters and tumbles, then gets flung around the course by a giant mallet. It’s like seeing people run down a hill of trampolines and trapdoors in comically large sumo suits.

Fall Guys stays comedic because you are always acutely aware of the difference between success and failure. You can envision, in your mind’s eye, what a perfect run of the brand-new Track Attack looks like. It should be so simple to cruise along the middle lane, threading the needle and blowing past the competition