Stumble Guys

A crowded lobby of wobbly little figures piles into an obstacle course, most of them get eliminated, and the survivors go again until one is left standing.

Falling over in good company

The knockout party format shrinks onto a phone better than it sounds. Controls come down to moving and jumping, the obstacles are drawn big and bold enough to read on a small display, and nothing in a round needs a tutorial. This is for people who want a multiplayer game they can play badly and still enjoy, ideally with friends in the same chat.

A knockout night, round by round

Rounds last a minute or two. You spawn in a scrum, get knocked sideways by somebody who mistimed a jump, scramble for a gap in the spinning arms, and either squeeze through the qualifying cut or watch the rest from above. Losing early barely registers because the next lobby is already filling. Custom rooms are where it comes alive, since a group of friends racing each other turns a chaotic scramble into an argument you can win.

Why the chaos reads on a small screen

The design discipline deserves credit. Courses telegraph their hazards, the physics on a collision are exaggerated enough to be funny rather than annoying, and the failure state is a pratfall instead of a defeat screen, which keeps the mood light after a bad run. Short rounds mean it never asks for a block of your evening, and the steady rotation of maps stops the course pool settling into something memorised.

The pass, the skins and the lobby draw

What wears on a casual player is being shown things that are not for them. The free track of the pass is visibly thinner than the paid one, limited bundles queue up for attention, and a non-paying player spends a good deal of the time between rounds looking at rewards belonging to somebody else. None of it changes how a round plays, which is the saving grace, but the shop is doing a lot of talking in a game that only asked you to jump. The uneven lobbies, where a first-week player lands among people who know every shortcut, are the other complaint worth taking seriously.

For a free party game this is well made and a genuinely good time with other people on the line, and its depth is exactly as shallow as it needs to be. Bring at least one person to shout at across the room.