The answer to the former is a little more complicated, because the whole point of Gang Beasts is that it's scrappy and janky, and. You can change some of the settings to determine how many wins you'll need to be triumphant, as well as what colour your character is, what costume to wear, and what stage you want, but ultimately, Gang Beasts keeps things very simple, with developer Boneloaf seemingly aware that they struck gold with the mechanics and don't need to dress things up too much. As for the Gangs and Football modes, we never actually matched with enough people to make them work, so we can't really say how good they are.īut the Switch is a natural home for Gang Beasts local play, if you have enough controllers. There's not much point in dinging Gang Beasts for offering an online mode, because the online mode works as it should, and it's there for people who want it - we just found it a bit dull with strangers, is all. We rarely got more than two other people in our matchmaking attempts, so the matches were somewhat subdued as well as silent, but the connection seemed good, and the latency was perfectly fine. You can invite people, but they have to already be on your Switch friends list, which is admittedly pretty standard. Sure, you can get a third-party app for voice chat, but that sort of defeats the point of a party game - although no one's really having parties right now anyway, which isn't Gang Beasts' fault. Without voice chat, which is not really one of the Nintendo Switch's strengths, Gang Beasts is a frustrating game about fighting unruly physics with a bunch of silent strangers. It's more about laughing at the ridiculous wiggling bodies and their ineffectual floppy headbutts than it is about the skill required to actually be good at the game, and that's fine by us.īut that does mean that Gang Beasts doesn't really work as well as an online multiplayer game. The winner is often, by default, the only person who didn't trip over their own feet - but that doesn't make it any less fun in Local Play, because the fun is the chaos. Most matches end because people struggle to keep their jellyboys upright, let alone managing to punch anyone else off a ferris wheel.

You can, of course, punch, kick, and headbutt your opponents, knocking them out and giving you a window of time in which to lob them into said obstacles, but you're just as likely to accidentally fall onto train tracks, or off the scaffolding, yourself. Each level has various obstacles - from meat grinders to, er, massive flaps in the floor that keep being opened by large, falling sausages - and the game is more about constantly avoiding these perils than it is about fighting. It's why people love Gang Beasts so much: the floppy ragdoll punching that skyrocketed this bone-free game into the public eye. There are two options: Local Play, and Online Play, as well as various modes, including Melee, Gangs, Football, and Waves. It's not a particularly graphically demanding game, and everything, from its mechanics to its menus, is pretty simple. Four years after its official release on PC, Xbox One, and PS4, it's finally reached the Switch - which we'd argue is the home of party games. It was out in Early Access for years, beginning in 2014, and chances are that if you've played it, it may well have been that EA version. It's strange, then, that it's taken such a long time to come to the Nintendo Switch. Gang Beasts is a chaotic, wonky physics brawler that relies on the utter incomp-itude of its players to create mirth and merriment, and much like a massive chocolate cake or a puppy, it's always been a huge success whenever we've pulled it out at parties. In the Party Game Hall of Fame, Gang Beasts is one of the OG big dogs, alongside Nidhogg, Jackbox, and Overcooked.

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Does gang beasts have cross play