Recently, I started working with Knockout City, a newly announced EA title developed by Velan Studios. It’s a competitive but lively multiplayer dodgeball game – as if Fortnite’s Tilted Towers expands into a bustling metropolis and its legions of teenage fledgling take to the streets to be a little naughty before dinner time.
It is very easy to understand, because it is a great game of improved burning – but with some peculiarities. And as much as I enjoyed shooting and catching balls, there was an aspect of Knockout City that appealed to me more than any other: becoming the ball.
Apparently having nothing better to do, the young men roam Knockout City in gangs of three or four fires, and throw balls at each other. It’s reminiscent of Rocket Arena, another EA team-based shooter, but swaps rocket-propelled grenades for rubber balls. And that is all you need to know, really. There is no list of unique heroes with compelling backstory here, however; it is simply a bright and colorful arena to play.
I asked Karthik Bala, founder and CEO of Valen Studios, why they chose burning in the first place. “Everyone knows about burning, and it’s just intuitive, which you understand only in terms of catching a ball, playing and catching,” he said. “And it was like, can we do something with this?”
I would say yes. In many ways, Knockout City does not need a plot in the background, as its main concern is whether it can provide a good time. I think so.
“Velan did magic here, translating the simple act of throwing and catching a game and giving it weight and weight.”
Through a handful of industrial maps, you and your squadmates hit the enemy hard, hoping to score them and earn points for your team. There is an expected variety of modes: classic team deathmatch, one where you collect diamonds after net eliminations and one where you can only use your teammates as a ball (my favorite of course). Just like the seminal film Dodgeball, and the real-life game of dodgeball (which the film clearly inspired), you dodge, duck, dive, dive and dodge until victory.
I found that one of the most satisfying moves doesn’t start with a D, but with a C, because you can catch the balls that are thrown at you. In real life, this eliminates an opposing player and brings one of your own back into the game, but it was well suited for a video game. With the right time, you can throw a catched ball back at your enemy with more force. It is less the feeling of beating your opponent that makes me more excited, and more the feeling of, er, cushioning someone else’s ball. Velan did magic here, translating the simple act of throwing and catching onto a video game and giving it a real sense of weight and weight.
I also need to shout for the fake move. It’s another super simple act, but I had flashes of evil joy while faking an adventure and watching my opponent instinctively clap in the air in a panic, trying to catch a ball that didn’t come. There are other tricks too, such as the ability to bend balls like hay, or lob up and up to get around obstacles.
Knockout City is different from competitive shooting games, where you aim and click people to death. Accuracy and confidence in extremely fast reaction speeds can discourage people, but the focus here is not on precision.
You automatically block opponents when preparing for an adventure, and I like that the games are not determined by which players can click on the pixelated heads faster than the others. I had to think more about where I was positioned, where my teammates were and how I was going to throw the ball, above all.
The type of ball I picked up also mattered. One was a time bomb, which added an element of hot potato to matches. You would see people playing back and forth in a desperate attempt not to be roasted. I learned to like the moon ball better, which imbued me with a zero-gravity effect whenever I jumped in the air. This allowed me to fly above my enemies and locate any juicy targets for my team.
But really, my favorite type of ball … was myself. In Knockout City, you can curl up in a sphere and become a hand-driven meatball. Press and hold Alt, and you will roll around the map like a droideka chasing Obi-Wan, or a Malteser who escaped from his package. A teammate can then pick it up and throw it at unsuspecting enemies.
The real fun lies in your teammates’ ability to turn you from a ball into the equivalent of a dodgeball. They can carry you until you are glowing and then throw you into the air – at that point, the controls are returned to you, as you guide your explosive self towards some poor unsuspecting bastards down there.
I think I found it so amusing because it seemed tortuous every time, as if I had read the fine print in the dodgeball rules book before a gold medal dispute and discovered a game-changing loophole. “Ah, but there’s nothing here that says I can’t score a point when turning Myself in a ball, isn’t it? “, I told the referee, and started jumping in the arms of my closest ally during the tiebreaker:” Chuck me, Danny. DO IT!”.
There is also the detail that, if the companions pass you, you will reach this state of bomb even faster. I asked Bala if anything took him by surprise during development, and he cited this strategy as something that no one on the team predicted, even if he put it into the system.
“There was a developmental moment when we had three players on a team. Player one rolled into the arms of player two and player two passed that teammate to the third player. And they were already in the final bomb state, immediately, “he said.” And we thought, what the hell happened, is this a bug ?! And it wasn’t really a bug at all … we didn’t explicitly program it, it just happened, because that’s what it should be doing as a system. “
Knockout City also took me by surprise, as I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Conceptually, it looks silly. But I think the fun I had mimics the burning in real life, in a way. I can see myself enjoying it in short bursts, you know? The odd session here and there to end at night. Perhaps as a brief, caricature break from my true love, Call Of Duty: Warzone. That may be the problem: what makes Knockout City different is what can prevent it from finding an audience in a predominantly shooter market. Only time will tell if the armed war boys are ready to embrace balls.