Skip to main content

Oh Wow Gang Beasts Has A Ferris Wheel Level Now Geez

Oh cool and AI enemies too rad

Not every game needs its every update covered, but Gang Beasts might. It's an indie single-screen fighting game with wobble physics, designed for 1-4 players to stumble around, punching and grabbing and tossing one another into meat grinders. Its latest alpha - 0.0.2, yep - adds three new levels, including one that set on a working ferris wheel and another with the game's first set of AI opponents.

The thing I love about Gang Beasts is it combines the throwaway, sillyphysics (a single, real word) of something like Sumotori Dreams with settings ripped out of action movies. So you can fight on a window cleaner's gondola, on the roof of a swerving truck, and now on a boardwalk ferris wheel. In the latter, you all start in the same cart, but can quickly leap out the windows. Don't try walking down the pier though; someone forgot to nail the wooden boards down.

Eventually Gang Beasts is going to allow for co-op, and the new level Streets is the start of that. It's a simple setup at the moment: you walk down the street and gangs of street punks appear from the buildings. It's also, if you're a lonely sort without many game-playing friends, your first opportunity to really play Gang Beasts on your own, without simply hurling yourself into its physics traps again and again. Which, to be honest, is pretty fun anyway.

Gang Beasts isn't a complicated pleasure. It's early days, and I'm sure the game will grow in scale and complexity as its developers add to it. But really, if the screenshot at the head of this post didn't already sell you on this as a thing worth playing, I don't know that we can really date anymore.

But maybe I'd be willing to give the relationship one last chance. Here, look at this GIF. Then do what feels right.

Read this next