Knockout City is fun, but there's not a lot of meat on the bone. The free week long trial was the best and worst thing to happen to this title and unfortunately the $20 price tag will probably render this thing dead in six months just like Bleeding Edge, Battleborn, Artifact, Gigantic.

The gameplay is fast and fun. It's sharp. There's a surprising amount of skill needed to be good at the game, but once you figure it out it seems like the skill ceiling is quite low overall. If you're not very good, you're going to get trounced. But it doesn't take long to get pretty decent. The hardest part of the game is getting good at catching, which you can get down fairly well if you spend an hour in The Hideout practicing.

Knockout City is fun. I want to reiterate that. But there's just not that much to see. The game just isn't that engaging. There's not enough depth to the gameplay and there's not enough stuff to do. It doesn't take you very long to see all there is to see. The music is cool at first but repetitive in the same way Falls Guys can get repetitive, but it has half the charm. The Jet Set Radio Future rip off aesthetic is cool but ultimately feels sort of generic. The cosmetics aren't very interesting and not creative enough. Even the coolest or more 'rare' skins and pieces stick way too close to the format of everything else. They aren't different enough to be compelling to compete for.

The ranking up in the game's ranked mode isn't very compelling either. The play a ton to rank up format is not all that interesting. The maps are a bit too large, there's a surprising amount of downtime during each round. You end up running around looking for a ball or trying to avoid opponents but not in any sort of way that's engaging. It feels wandering. The best maps have a lot of verticality to them but only two of the maps really fit that description (the one with the traffic and the one with the trains). I also don't understand why the respawn timer is so long. There's no objectives to push or third party neutral kind of things to win. All there is to do is hit people with balls and get hit by balls. So, I don't see why the downtime is so high. If anything it disadvantages the team in the lead by giving them less people to hit. It really just slows the game down and that's all.

I'd never have played this game if it weren't for the free trial. And I really did enjoy it for the price of free. At the same time, I was bored of the game before the trial had ended anyway. The trial let me play the game, but the trial let me see everything I wanted to see. I was over the game within the week. The $20 pricetag is just too much for me and too much for me to recommend the game to others. It's just not good enough for that pricepoint. Like games like Bleeding Edge, the pricetag will shy away too many people. I bet in six months the playerbase will be so minimal and the revenue too slow to continue to warrant further development. I don't wish this for the game. I hope it thrives like Overwatch and that there'll be enough incentive to continue to iterate. Making the game more fun. Increasing movement speed, shortening the maps, making the map taller etc.

There's a lot to like for Knockout City. Not enough to like for $20 though. And not enough to sink multiplayer-only game hours into. Even after 25 hours and a week of gametime I was spent on what Knockout City had to offer. Maybe I'll have reason to revisit it in a few months. I hope I will.