Part two! Battleblock Theater Multiplayer this time. “Multi” in my case is playing with one other friend for about an hour and a half. Almost all the problems I have with the multiplayer could probably have been solved by having more players. Bear that in mind as I review the…
Battleblock Theater (multiplayer)
I didn’t get to all the game modes. The other player and I picked the ones that looked fun and went with them. I’m a trained professional, kids.
Challenge Race
Couldn’t get it to work. Next!
King of the Hill
It’s exactly how it sounds. Y’all know what King of the Hill is. You park yourself on a shiny golden tile and stay there as long as possible. The other guy(s) try and punch, throw, or uppercut you off while you try and punch, throw, or uppercut them away. You also get the weapons and tools you unlock in the campaign, which put me at a pretty significant advantage in some cases (’cause the other guy had default Frisbee mines and I had grenades and energy blasts). However, we discovered that every weapon we used could be fairly easily avoided, and sometimes even returned to the sender with the right moves. They weren’t game breakers and the other guy won a ton of times. Skill trumped equipment. Pretty important balancing factor there, and I’m glad they got it right.
When some of the stages showed up with two King spots though, things started to break down. They were clearly meant for more than just two people. One on one, it was just two guys trying to stay on their respective pads while randomly hucking items at each other. Not so fun.
There were some hilarious good times, but more people would give it that party game chaos I’m looking for in a King of the Hill match.
Capture the Horse
It’s Capture the Flag but with cube horses. You try and ride the other guy’s horse into your stable, while your own horse sits there like a stone and blocks you from making a goal, forcing you to get off your horse, get on the other horse, ride it a foot or two the side, get back on the first horse, and make a goal, all while the other guy is trying to stop you.
Yeah…this one definitely doesn’t work well with two people. You need two teams of two. Even so, I don’t think restricting CTF to a ground-based game added anything to the mode. In fact, with all the verticality and speed that’s possible in this game, I think it would have been more fun if it were just a straight CTF mode with a bunch of cube guys flying through the air and beating the stuffing out of each other. But that might just be me. Needs more people either way.
Muckle
Fun fact: “muckle”, a variant of the word “mickle”, is a chiefly Scottish word meaning “great, or much” according the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Another fun fact: in that context, this game mode name makes no sense whatsoever.
At this point the other player and I decided to quit screwing around and try out the deathmatch mode. By far it was the most doable with two people, and we had a ton of fun with it. Battleblock Theater felt now like some daffy combination of Spelunky deathmatch and Madworld, where you got more points when you punched or spiked enemies into deathtraps. Unfortunately, a lot of the level design in the vanilla game left something to be desired. We spent most matches trying to uppercut each other into spiky ceiling in the middle of the arena, never moving from the spot. Occasionally there were some twists that forced us to do things differently, but overall the lack of imagination and stage utilization disappointed me. It was no Smash Bros. We had a good time all the same.
And now:
Co-op Story Mode
This was actually the first mode we tried, but I saved it for last here because I thought it was divine.
When playing the story by yourself, there are a lot of moves that you never get to use. Things like up-shoves, judo throws, ledge assists, head jumps; just tons of moves that have such limited use. I spent a lot of the campaign, while loving it the way it was, looking forward to the time I could use them all with a friend.
Now I know. Battleblock Theater with a partner is the real way to play.
Even the little things, like vaulting your partner up to a high ledge then jumping up and grabbing their hand, just felt so delightfully co-operative. It’s a whole different experience when you have to rely on someone else to get through. They rebuilt all the story levels to feature co-op puzzles, which is an entirely new avenue of possibility for puzzles, and it was complex before. The best part is, you can dick over your partners all the time and still be OK. As long as one of you makes it to the checkpoint, the other one can catch up via respawn. You can progress and be a troll to your friends. That is impressive. Of course I’m perfectly ladylike and never dropped my partner into a spikepit intentionally, but the thought that we could do that to each other and still win just…tickled me. That is exactly the way to do it. You did it right, Battleblock Theater.
In conlusion
I almost think this review is a little unfair. I had neither the time nor the willing participants necessary to explore the multiplayer to it’s fullest extent. On the other hand, I feel they could have done more to make the game modes more compatible for 2-player play, especially since there’s only a 4-player maximum. Still, my friend and I made it work, and even the “bad” modes were fun. Good stuff. Not as tight and perfect as the single player, but still good stuff.
Check out the single player review!
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