Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

I’m aware that people complained about Slime Climb being the first round of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, though I’ve never experienced that myself. The game was out for a couple weeks before I started playing it, so it’s possible that a patch removed Slime Climb from first-round rotation before I hopped in. I can only imagine, however, the nightmare this would be.

In case you’re not familiar, Fall Guys is an elimination-style series of relay races and minigames, starting with 60 players and whittling down the numbers across several rounds of challenges. The last player standing at the end of it all is the winner.

So the first match will feature approximately 60 players, while the second usually begins with around 40, and so on. Slime Climb is a difficult race up a slippery slope filled with chokepoints and obstacles. I’ve played Slime Climb as the second round (with 40-ish players) several times, and it’s pure chaos. 60 players would be unmanageable.

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

However, I have experienced See Saw as the first round, and See Saw suffers from its own set of first-round problems. See Saw, as the name implies, features a series of seesaws that must be hopped across, yet the weight of players causes them to tilt. If they tilt too far in either direction, they become too steep to stand on.

There are two types of players in See Saw: those who have figured out the tilting mechanics, and those who haven’t. The former group races ahead while the latter group sort of plods along, perpetually dropping into the slime as a result of not understanding the physics behind what’s happening. People in the latter group will often hurl themselves off edges and onto already-too-steep seesaws, causing those seesaws to remain tilted too far to be passable.

So what ends up happening is that there’s just a roadblock that will halt your progress as a waterfall of new players drops onto the seesaw, only to be dumped off the edge. You have to just sort of wait for it to balance itself out again. This can sometimes take more than a minute, if you have a persistent enough group of seesaw tilters.

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

The other option is that you end up in the beginning of the pack. You race as fast as you can across the seesaws before they’ve been tilted by other players, crossing the finish line ahead of just about everyone else. Then you wait. And you wait. And you wait until 40-ish players have managed to solve the seesaw physics and crossed the finish line. This can take several minutes.

So unless you manage to get grouped up with 59 other players who know exactly what they’re doing, you’re going to spend a lot of time just waiting. And Fall Guys is otherwise a pretty fast-moving game — you can really feel those minutes go by, preventing you from making your way toward Fall Mountain and a possible victory.

And while this can still be a problem in later rounds, it’s certainly not as bad once you’ve eliminated 1/3 of the players from the game. 40ish people seems like a reasonable amount for See Saw.

And I think the folks at developer Mediatonic know how miserable this is. In fact, the official Fall Guys Twitter account tweeted this:

Have other players got better at See Saw or have we all just accepted our painful existence?

So they know! They know our pain, and yet they do nothing to soothe these aches. We, the Fall Guys players, only exist to suffer, and Mediatonic drinks this suffering like an aged mead, holding their bellies and laughing with a wicked mirth that can only be enjoyed at the expense of others’ misfortunes.

But I don’t know. Maybe there will be a patch or something?

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