(This is part of a series of retrospective reviews of some of the titles I explored almost a month ago during Party Game weekend... I'm still doing independent play and research on a few so I'll be spacing out these reviews to avoid flooding.)

Unfortunately, I don't think that Move or Die is one of the party games that gelled with my friends and I. The gimmick behind Move or Die is to engage in a series of random "last one standing" scenarios via 2D platforming that usually throw a bunch of hazards in your way (i.e. what I refer to as "monkey in the cage" platforming); the game heavily discourages camping as a viable option by making you take damage if you stand still or just jump in place. However, you can easily bypass this mechanism by dash dancing in place, which the game will still recognize as movement and more or less serves the same function as camping. As a result, not only do I think the gimmick is somewhat worn out and obsolete, but I also think the game gets stale pretty quickly as many of these last man standing scenarios feel very similar to one another. Port quality issues that popped up when double controller input glitches occurred on my Twitch Prime copy also did not help the overall experience. If you're looking for a more chaotic quick session arena party game, I'd definitely suggest Duck Game or Stick Fight: The Game over this.

While at moments this was really fun, I can't help but notice the many, many issues this game has in many ways.

First of all, why the hell do I have to GRIND through many, many online matches to unlock most game modes, which is a huge problem since we are talking about a party game, and party games in general are games that you play for fun with friends, not something you would try and master for a multitude of hours, and in the process of grinding, you will have to play the same game modes over and over and over and over again, and most of the starting modes aren't even fun and are very poorly balanced, except for a few like Bomb Tag (which I thought was pretty fun). (And this is not even taking into account the mutations, then with the mutations you will have to grind twice as long to unlock everything, genuinely heinous!)

And speaking of game modes, they are a mixed bag, some are really fun such as Bomb Tag, others are bad and/or unbalanced like Fizzle Floor and Sugar Rush, and others are pretty middle of the road, but then, as said in that sentence above, there are also mutations to keep matches more varied, like, for example, a mutation where the rules of the game are reversed and instead of Move or Die it's actually Move AND Die, or another where your character starts moving slowly but then moves hyper fast. Again, like the game modes, they are a mixed bag, but more of them are leaning into the unbalanced side of things, like for example, on the one where you need to be close to someone in order to not lose HP, in the mode 'God Gun' if there are two players alive, the only way for someone to win with this mutation activated is if they get lucky and get to be the guy controlling the laser weapon at the top of the screen, else they lose, so it's now 'Get Lucky or Die' and not 'Move or Die' like the title says otherwise, this also applies to modes like Bomb Tag too, and even without mutations, some of these modes are very luck reliant for you to win, like Sugar Rush, where if the candy appears at your very side in a 1v1 scenario, you already won, where as if you spawn too far from it, you cannot win unless the other player can barely traverse the level properly, and speaking of 1v1 scenarios, some modes and mutations are borderline useless or luck is 100% the determining factor for whether you lose or win, for example, in a 2 player scenario where you get Souls, the one who doesn't get shot first will always win the mode. Well, I could go on and on but at this point you probably got the idea of what I want to say already.

So just before finishing this review, I want to also talk about how the way you host matches is pretty underwhelming, first of all, you cannot change the settings of your match once you press 'confirm', if you want to change the settings of the match, tough shit, go back to the main menu, also the settings are too simple, the only things you can really do is changing the length of the match, whether mutations are enabled or disabled, whether MODS are also enabled or disabled, and I think there is another setting I am missing right now but yeah, that is it, you can't choose to make it so only the host choose the mutations, you can't choose from every single mode you want to play in the match (only a limited selection), which I find rather disappointing, as I wanted to play this with friends and I generally host the matches.

Okay so that is it for this, I mean, do I recommend you to play this game with friends? Yeah, I guess? Just remember what I said in the first paragraph, but in comparison to other party games like Ultimate Chicken Horse or Worms Armageddon, this has one too many issues for me to ignore it, and of course this score should be based on how well it does what it sets out to do, and it does to pretty middling results.