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Clocked

The good, the bad, and the excellent of a ‘Fall Guys’ mobile port

JH

by James He

JH

by James He

Internet sensation and viral hit, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, is coming to mobile devices in China (for now). Here’s what that means.

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has become a worldwide phenomenon over the last few weeks. Part of the top 10 games on Steam and boasting a million followers on Twitch, it’s not hard to see why this game’s coming to mobile.

In addition to PC and PS4, Chinese publisher Bilibili has announced themselves as the owners of the rights to release the game on mobile devices. With any game coming onto a new platform, there’s always questions needing to be asked: what will work, and what won’t?

fall guys

Everything’s under control

Featuring a snazzy soundtrack, cute visuals and simple, intuitive controls, Fall Guys has become the ultimate newcomer in the knockout genre of battle royales. The controls are actually one of the biggest reasons we would celebrate its mobile release; they aren’t demanding and don’t require an extreme level of precision, making the port to touch screens a natural next step.

Unlike other games (I’m looking at you, mobile first-person shooters) where the screen is covered by buttons, Fall Guys only has basic movement and three commands (jump, grab and dive) for simplicity.

Game developers are generally turned off by transitioning games from PC/console to mobile because the game would lose a lot of its features and become saddled with more issues. Smartphones don’t have the processing power of gaming computers or consoles, so graphics and system requirements will need to be lowered, but this isn’t an issue for Fall Guys. The game highlights casual gameplay with friends over stunning visuals (although we still love the cute designs). Fans can expect Bilibili to publish the mobile version without losing its original glory.

The oldest enemy

A fate besetting too many online games, internet connectivity will no doubt be an issue. With 60 concurrent players in each game plus the fact that mobile connections are often unstable, it’s hard to imagine a game without lag interfering. Even if your ping is stable, there’s no guarantee that someone else won’t start teleporting due to poor latency.

There’s also the issue of cheating and server overloading, as seen with their initial PC release. As these issues have been overcome before, we can expect a swift resolution in case it happens again.

That said, we can totally forgive server issues considering how cute the Fall Guys server owl is.

Rounds on rounds on rounds

Each round in Fall Guys is different, and some mini-games will play out differently on mobile devices. The qualifying stages will be something we look forward towards when playing on our smartphones. The chaotic first rounds where players are given opportunities to betray or work with each other will become even more hilarious as we’re given a lesser degree of control on our devices.

The casual environment of Fall Guys means we’re here for any sort of goofy free-for-all. It wasn’t designed for speedrunners to test their limits, it’s a party game for everyone and a mobile release will help equalise the balance between all players. Hopefully, it’ll prevent players from completing the Slime Climb in 50 seconds… again.

Final thoughts? A mobile version of the game will be very fitting, and we can’t wait to see how it all plays out on our devices. Here’s hoping the Chinese release is a success and we’ll all be playing Fall Guys on mobile soon.

 

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is out now on PlayStation 4 and PC via Steam.

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