Developer: Red Limb Studio
Publisher: Red Limb Studio
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC
Beat Me! – Review
Games, where you can fight against your friends and risk your friendship by beating them time after time, are always very fun to play. Beat Me! Is one of those games where you can take on friends locally, or fight against others in the online mode. Such games are most compatible with consoles as you will easily have multiple controllers available for multiple players. In this scenario, there’s only a PC version, which makes things a tiny bit harder. Nonetheless, we were curious if Beat Me! would beat any records.
Story
Sadly, in the base gameplay of this game, there’s absolutely no story to be found. The tutorial level lets you get acquainted with the game’s controls in a type of single-player mode that’s way too short. With the game’s gameplay and art style, they could have easily made a single-player mode that would have been very fun to play. The tutorial raises the curtain on a puppeteer’s show with Puppetuppon, the king of puppets giving you orders to prove your worth to him. This feels like a missed shot at a great scenario for a story mode, as the game does nothing with it after this introduction.
Graphics
The game’s graphics look quite nice with 2D platforming gameplay in a 3D environment. Each area has its own style for background and platforms that perfectly match the scenery. Each playable character has its own distinctive features and they all look quite good in the game’s graphical style. Some areas have weather-based effects like rain or storm that improve the setting of the level even more. When a battle takes a long time, special effects will occur, like lightning crashing down upon players or a whale that will approach the players and eventually devours them. While these won’t always appear, they are quite fun to see. The environments are also highly interactive with a lot of objects that can be interacted with in each level.
Sound
Each level has its own background music that matches the environment perfectly. As there are a lot of different areas to fight in, there are also quite a lot of different background themes to listen to. Most of these tracks sound very cheerful, but when you are fighting in a darker environment, like a dark castle or a graveyard, the music becomes gloomier as well. All of these music pieces won’t really last long, but mostly, they don’t need to because most matches will have a short duration. The latter is because these will end when there’s only one player left standing or end by the sudden death effect after a set amount of time.
Gameplay
Beat Me! Is a physics-based multiplayer game, with some comical fantasy characters, that focuses on (team) deathmatches and an endless wave mode. After playing the tutorial that teaches you all the basic controls of the game, you are ready for action. Aside from the Wave mode, there isn’t more to do on your own.
Beat Me! can be played locally, but only if you have another person to play with. Deathmatches require more than one player to be present as you can’t add AI enemies to play against. With this, Wave Mode will be your only option to play alone locally, but this is a big disappointment as well. The Wave mode is simply too hard to survive on your own, because the sheer number of enemies coming at you is just too big to handle on your own at some point, leading to imminent death.
Playing online can be a lot of fun to play, if you manage to get in an online match. On several occasions when we started the game, we weren’t even able to play online as we got an error with not being able to connect to the network while we had a stable cabled connection. Team Deathmatches can be played with up to six people, and will be a lot of fun with the changing environment around you and the number of enemies you need to watch out for. Eventually winning can feel as quite an accomplishment.
The Steam page of Beat Me! states a number of different game modes. While two is still a number, we were definitely expecting more than just two. Each fight is seen as a puppeteer’s play, but sadly with the shortness of each fight, the game definitely lacks depth. When playing the deathmatch mode, there are four rounds of multiple battles. After each round, all the players will spawn in the king’s arena where the king evaluates the results of the completed round. Sometimes, it will be a race where you need to reach the far end of the arena before the enemies catch up.
Conclusion
Beat Me! looks like a game with a lot of potential, and the multiplayer can be quite fun if you have friends to play with, be it online or offline. The latter only counts if you have the equipment needed to connect multiple controllers to your PC. We definitely think that the developers could have gotten a lot more out of the game by adding a single-player mode with some decent story content. Both Deathmatch and Wave Mode are great to play if you are able to connect with other players online or with friends locally, but the game doesn’t really offer much to do. If you like games purely built on multiplayer on PC, then you’re good with this one, but for those who want to play with friends locally in an efficient way, we’d recommend delaying your purchase when the console versions release in the future.
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