Attempting to win often seems less important than trying to climb things or see whether you can get through that door or hop over that barrier. The literal high point is a Ferris wheel at the end of a pier. You fight in a window-cleaning gondola on the side of a skyscraper - can you detach it from the building? You fight on top of trucks racing along on a freeway - can you jump between them? You fight in a subway station among speeding trains - can you duck under them? You fight among meat grinders, incinerators and giant fans. The nine currently available stages vary wildly in complexity and theme, which perfectly complements the drunken comedy of playing the game. Often as not, at least some of the party will go off and just explore the level. There are sound effects and so on, but the general soundtrack to Gang Beasts is the noise of the people playing it hooting with delight at every one of these turnarounds. No matter how beaten down, half-ejected players often manage to wobble and hop their way back into the fray. In this case, things quickly evolve into one of those three-way WWE bouts where the objective is to propel the other guys over the top rope, but any time anyone gets close to doing so the leftover combatant miraculously wakes up and sabotages the attempt. Or maybe someone else will get involved, which complicates things.
If you somehow go down, the other will try to hoist you up and urge you over the nearest perilous railing, although you will probably regain consciousness and steady yourself by grabbing onto the scenery, locking you into the gladiatorial equivalent of a romantic teenage phone conversation where neither side will hang up. If you remain isolated, the pair of you will probably start circling each other like hot pockets caught in a tide pool, failed jousters locked in a vortex of inability. You start off haring at your nearest opponent, fists lurching outward as though they're tied to bits of string and someone's yanking on the other end, before usually completely missing them with all but a glancing blow. Dumping unconscious opponents on a conveyor belt flowing into a fire is a good, clean kill. And everything is sloppy and lagged as though the programmers are slurring their code, meaning that even the most basic offensive strategies are mangled by imprecision, leaving you to wheel around groping for whatever cack-handed opportunism can save the day. Another button lets you raise your arms above your head like Daniel in The Karate Kid. You have individual control of your hands, which you can wave around to jab at other players, and by holding instead of mashing the punch buttons you can grip onto things. This would probably be fun anyway, but the thing that elbows Gang Beasts out of the fighting game genre and into the party game pile is the controls, which by any objective measure are rubbish. (There's no gore to speak of - it's usually like watching someone steamroller a hacky sack.) You generally do this by putting your enemy into a brief KO state and then hoisting them above your head and throwing them into an abyss, or through the jaws of industrial machinery where they can be squeezed into oblivion. You and up to seven other players each control an angry little pillow of jelly (I'm talking about Gang Beasts now, even though the Jeremy Kyle thing still works) and your job is to overcome your adversaries by pummelling them with your mighty fists and then disposing of them in one of the many hazards that fill out each distinctive stage. None of this is a bad thing, at least to begin with. Gang Beasts is more like the after-party at a Jeremy Kyle taping, watching 50-year-old alcoholics groping their way through a fight where successful acts of aggression are less important than the basic ability to prop oneself up. However, playing Gang Beasts in its Early Access form does not remind me of the many happy hours I spent in the company of Cody, Haggar, Axel and that one guy who looked like Conan. Having grown up with those games, they strike me as excellent things from which to spiritually descend. According to the Gang Beasts website, developer Boneloaf originally sought to create the spiritual descendant of scrolling beat-'em-ups like Final Fight, Streets of Rage and Golden Axe.
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