I've been following the dev blog for this game for years, and it's sad to say I had an unpleasant experience. Terrible performance, lots of connecting issues. It's a mess. You'd think with all the performance issues; it must mean the game is running complicated effects, but everything just feels like a placeholder. The fonts, the UI design, how everything moves. It's really disappointing. I can run Chrome + Red Dead 2 but not this game? How does that make any sense? As for the online and connectivity, this is probably better with local games. But I bought it with the assumption that I can play it in and out casually. And another thing, the non-default announcers sound awful. It just takes you out of the experience hearing "the developer made me say this" several times, and they also sound so unenergetic. It's so bad. I was excited to see some of my favorite people in there, just to find out they phoned it in. Much like my overall experience with the game. I was excited, then I was heavily disappointed. But hey, these are just first impressions. Still, you'd think after a couple years of this game being active on Steam, that these issues would have been fixed by now. Actually heartbroken

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.