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cover-Fall Guys

Tuesday, August 4, 2020 11:09:09 PM

Fall Guys Review (jp)

Update 9.19.20 || The devs have addressed the cheating issue and have finally added EAC, which has helped to alleviate the cheating problem. I'm still going to leave this review as it was at the time that I wrote it to stand as testament to how terrible this game was on release.
I still don't recommend this game. I have zero faith in these developers. The anticheat took far longer than it should have to be added and all the other issues with this game still remain unaddressed.
PS, usernames are STILL disabled. I'm pretty confident the developers have no intention of re-enabling them. RIP grabbing ttv streamers, it was the only truly fun thing to do in this game.
//
This game's launch has been an absolute trainwreck.
THE GAME RUNS ENTIRELY CLIENT-SIDE, which means people can blatantly speedhack with no special hack tools. The game also has NO ANTI-CHEAT, AT ALL. The closest thing to anti-cheat is a single text channel in the game's official Discord where you can manually report cheaters, which, surprise, doesn't actually get any cheaters banned.
Users were able to use HTML in their Steam username to make their names appear large or colorful in-game. I never once saw this used for anything malicious yet the developers went nuclear and decided that, RATHER THAN FIXING the html injection, to just force every single player's in-game name to "Fall Guy ####". WHY NOT JUST FIX THE HTML IN USER'S NAMES. Let me give your programmers a hint, it's called input sanitization, you can look up a tutorial for it on YouTube and actually do your job.
So with those two problems coupled together, yeah let me just go and file a report against someone with nothing but the username "Fall Guy 1234" to go on—I can't even track their Steam account through recent games. Keep in mind also that this game has a million-some players and there are only 4 digits in each randomized name, so there are going to be several dozen duplicates of each numerical name. The devs couldn't track that to a player even if they wanted to, so no one is getting banned for cheating. Great work guys. It's only going to get worse as the game goes on if nothing gets fixed.
This game has the worst netcode of any game I've ever played. There's a gamemode that involves running around the map and stealing tails from other players. This minigame was copy-pasted twice to make three equally garbage modes, I've heard dozens of complains against them from friends and streamers and I don't think a single person actually enjoys playing them. Enemies with Walmart parking lot tier internet can grab you from over 10 feet away and when you attempt to grab the tail off an enemy you can see the grab icon pop up on their character and nothing happens 50% of the time. It's so inconsistent that there's almost no skill here, just pure luck.
Nobody enjoys the forced team gamemodes either. You only have a small amount of control to the outcome of team games, so winning equates to a simple game of luck based on how bad your teammates are. In addition to that, this is a physics-based game, using Unity's default physics engine. It's horrifically inconsistent and sometimes your character will simply trip over their own feet, falling down and losing the game because someone grabs your tail while you're on the floor, or you jump down a level on Hex-a-gone and your character simply trips for no reason and you fall to your death while you try to stand up. The physics make the game feel horrible to play. Half of the minigames feel like they were quickly thrown together in the last 2 weeks of development to meet quota. Especially "Perfect Match", the game where no one ever dies unless they're literally afk.
Only *one day* after releasing, the game's servers completely died, for absolutely everyone, for almost an entire day. They had previously been dropping constantly in the middle of games. The devs' had presumably been attempting to migrate their servers to a different host with a larger capacity, but apparently failed to do so and were being very secretive as to why. They had announced a maintenance would begin at 6:00 am, but randomly decided to begin six hours early at peak player count time and gave no ETA for when it would be finished. The "maintenance" ended up taking almost the entire day and no one could play the game the entire time. When the game first officially released they deliberately avoided announcing the time that the game would unlock. They also avoided notifying players when the servers were back online after the "maintanance". They clearly knew the servers would choke on the first day and didn't fix the servers in the three day period before the game launched, or, you know, several months before, they had ample reason to predict this would be a problem but did nothing.
My favorite part of it all is that the developers are BLAMING THE PLAYERS for their problems. On Twitter they blamed the players when the servers went over capacity, clearly their fault, and they blamed the players when users used html in their names, also clearly their own fault. Fix your game.
The game has a separate Twitter account for the server status. Not only has the account constantly lied about the status of the servers, in addition to claiming they "would tweet when the servers are back online" and then didn't, I thought it was pretty hilarious that the main Twitter playfully posted something along the lines of "Look how many people are following our server account!". Yeah, no, they're not following that because they want to hear your awful hello-fellow-kids tweets, they're doing it because they want to know when the servers are going to be back online for the game they all paid $20 for.
The devs had MONTHS to beta test this game and somehow bafflingly didn't catch on to the fact that the servers wouldn't have enough capacity to handle the amount of players on launch. Or fix the broken netcode. Or add anticheat. Or fix html in usernames. Or rework the bad minigames. I refuse to believe this kind of stuff wasn't caught in QA, which means either there was no QA, or the devs just ignored the feedback.
I've never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot and handle success so poorly.
And to the people claiming that this is excusable because "they're just a small indie company", it isn't, because they're not. They have 230 employees and have existed since 2005. This is pure incompetence. I don't see this game lasting past its first season.