It was a day like any other, I was just relaxing on my computer, after a long day... when suddenly I get a Steam invite from out of the blue from a stranger! Bro Falls: Ultimate Showdown... as an alumnus of both Fall Guys and Stumble Guys, even the name Bro Falls seemed a bridge too far to me, another weird name trying at the same time to have a similar cadence to Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout and to be unique as a game name. In any case, I downloaded it, and watched the opening cutscene as the game came to life. A man is grocery shopping, he leaves the broccoli behinds. It calls out to him, desparate, afraid - until it decides it has had enough.
Bro Falls: Ultimate Showdown is equally about the Broccoli who snaps out of neglect and the rest of the food items who fall into his twisted game. Taking the form of an asymmetric party platformer à la Deathrun from Garry's Mod, every game there are up to 60 players, surviving for safe places, and a Broccoli who activates the traps and attempts to stave back the food, as when they beat the map they have free license to attack the Broccoli, distracting him from activating traps and having the potential to remove him from a round entirely. Both sides are fun to play as; playing as the food doing the course it is pretty simple to outmaneuver the broccoli just by reading the crowd and catching peeks of where they are physically if you can, but this is mitigated by the actual platforming bits being fun and varied if hindered by a bit of a small map selection. Playing the broccoli is fun too in a more visceral way, you click the button at the right time, and people die. Some traps can be endured or beaten with enough grit from the players, but more often than not they result in instant death, creating an interesting meta of looking for means of concentrating the players, before activating a trap and sending a bunch of them to the start in one fell swoop, restarting the process.
Each game culminates in the final round, where (usually) 10 runners and the broccoli themself are put on even ground and have to outlast each other in a variety of nail-bitingly tense final rounds, be it soccer, snowball fight, final platforming challenge to grab the crown... these rounds feel like they are just long enough and a lot of fun to see resolve.
I've also heard rumours that this game is a crypto miner. The proofs I've seen range from unfalsifiable (that it uses a lot of GPU, I don't really play enough demanding games to compare) to outright false (I saw one accusation purporting there was a webminer service in plaintext in one of the game files, which is both demonstrably false and would be really stupid). But, having checked, it is like definitely gross spyware, but in the same way Steam is definitely gross spyware even more
Bro Falls: Ultimate Showdown is equally about the Broccoli who snaps out of neglect and the rest of the food items who fall into his twisted game. Taking the form of an asymmetric party platformer à la Deathrun from Garry's Mod, every game there are up to 60 players, surviving for safe places, and a Broccoli who activates the traps and attempts to stave back the food, as when they beat the map they have free license to attack the Broccoli, distracting him from activating traps and having the potential to remove him from a round entirely. Both sides are fun to play as; playing as the food doing the course it is pretty simple to outmaneuver the broccoli just by reading the crowd and catching peeks of where they are physically if you can, but this is mitigated by the actual platforming bits being fun and varied if hindered by a bit of a small map selection. Playing the broccoli is fun too in a more visceral way, you click the button at the right time, and people die. Some traps can be endured or beaten with enough grit from the players, but more often than not they result in instant death, creating an interesting meta of looking for means of concentrating the players, before activating a trap and sending a bunch of them to the start in one fell swoop, restarting the process.
Each game culminates in the final round, where (usually) 10 runners and the broccoli themself are put on even ground and have to outlast each other in a variety of nail-bitingly tense final rounds, be it soccer, snowball fight, final platforming challenge to grab the crown... these rounds feel like they are just long enough and a lot of fun to see resolve.
I've also heard rumours that this game is a crypto miner. The proofs I've seen range from unfalsifiable (that it uses a lot of GPU, I don't really play enough demanding games to compare) to outright false (I saw one accusation purporting there was a webminer service in plaintext in one of the game files, which is both demonstrably false and would be really stupid). But, having checked, it is like definitely gross spyware, but in the same way Steam is definitely gross spyware even more