Scuffed Fall Guys Clones (PC) Review

Today we are taking a look at scuffed Fall Guys Clone attempts. Fall Guys is a popular minigame based Battle Royale Game, that has a lot of platforming stages. Games like 'Stumble Guys' or 'Bro Falls' are good alternatives, if you like these kinds of games. There are however also a bunch of really cheap knockoff-attempts, that consumers can only be warned about. Some of those, were are going to take a closer look at today, are 'Royale King', 'Yappie Knockout' and 'Fall Girls'. I am also going to shortly mention the Fail Guys stages of 'Let it Flow' (previously reviewed: https://gamereviewnation.blogspot.com/2021/06/let-it-flow-pc-review.html). 

Royale King released on October 2023 on Steam and has an all-time player peak of 23. Right now there are usually 0 players online. It has 6 very similar stages based on the Hex-A-Gone Final of Fall Guys, 3 classic Race-Stages from Fall Guys, some Arena stages with enemies and one really odd Dodgeball stage, which didn't seem to function properly. The Hexagon stages work fine for what they attempt. The Race and Arena stages are just annoying. Obstacles move multiple times faster than your character and a single touch immediately takes you out of the match. I am not sure what is supposed to be enjoyable about these stages. There is also a map creator in the game, which sounds great, but doesn't seem to work at all.

Controls in Royale King function okay, but are nothing special and the visuals are very simple and basic. Overall I would probably give this game a 3/10.

Yappie Knockout released in July 2023 on Steam and previously on Itch.io as well as their private Yahaha Launcher. This also bothers me a lot. You can download the game on Steam, but you can't play, unless you register on their Yahaha Website and download their launcher from there. If you release a game on Steam it should be directly playable on Steam. According to some players this might have been different at the Steam Launch and might have been patched in later, which would be very scammy. Anyhow, Yappie Knockout has an all-time player peak of 17. It might have had higher player numbers at the Itch.io launch, even though I doubt it.

Yappie Knockout is probably a bit better looking than Royale King (not much though), but the developers of this game are, in contrast to the Solo Dev of Royale King, a professional studio. Yappie also rip-offs much more stages of Fall Guys than Royale King did. There are Yappie versions of Starchart, Snowball Survival, Hoarders, Hex-A-Gone, Tip Toe, Door Dash, Egg Scramble and many others. Honestly I am not going to bother to list them all up. They are just low effort rip-offs of Fall Guys stages. On a lot of these stages they didn't even bother to change the name. It is a miracle that there hasn't been a lawsuit against this game. Probably because nobody plays it. As far as I could tell there wasn't a single original level in this game. To be fair, there was however still a bigger variety in stages than in Royale King (even though just because Yahaha Studios seem to be better at stealing), therefore I would probably give Yappie Knockout a very generous 4/10. 

Another Fall Guys Rip-Off I want to mention today is Fall Girls. It released in March 2022 and has a player peak of 35. The game even uses the same fond as Fall Guys, just that all characters are waifu girls. Dear goodness... In contrast to Royale King or Yappie Knockout the game isn't even F2P, but regularly costs 5 Euro instead. I am certainly not going to spend this to try this game out. From the footage I have seen on Youtube I would say that it might at least visually looks the best so far, but that is not really an accomplishment. In contrast to the other games, Fall Girls is actually not an Online Battle Royale, but a Solo Platforming game instead. There is no timelimit and the Bots contestants don't matter at all. The movement speed is also painfully slow. This game is clearly just a joke, but an expensive one for that and honestly not even that funny. As mentioned, I haven't played my self, but I don't think I would have given this game more than 2-3/10 at most. 

Another game that I actually did play was Let it Flow. It is the result of a chaotic Twitch experiment, where a streamer asked his audience to suggest him content to implement into a new game and Let It Flow is the product of this insanity. It is clearly also a Meme game, but at least it is occasionally funny and completely free. The game has 6 different game modes. One of them is Trophy Hunt, which consists of obstacle based parkour levels and most of these stages are called 'Fail Guys' levels. These stages are like racing levels from Fall Guys, except that one player has to grab a trophy at the end to win, similar to Fall Mountain from Fall Guys. Hitting an object (like rotating toilet paper rolls or bounce pads) will make players bounce uncontrollably into the nowhere, which in most cases will lead to an elimination. Players however can infinitely retry till somebody catches the trophy. What gives these Trophy Hunt levels a special twist is the fact, that players can also shoot at each other during the race, which makes it even more chaotic.

An update of the game to Unreal Engine 5 has unfortunately broken some parts of the game, so that players will for example fall through the ground on some stages. That's unfortunate. Without this glitch I would have probably given the Fail Guys stages a 5/10, which is at least better than any of the other really scuffed Fall Guys imitations so far. 

But lets not forget Block Arena, which is actually the best of the Scuffed Fall Guys clones. I already reviewed it in a previous article, but I think it is worth mentioning in this context (https://gamereviewnation.blogspot.com/2021/05/block-arena-pc-review.html). Block Arena specialises in copying the Hexagon levels of Fall Guys, but offers a couple of unique twists to the falling blocks formula. There are options for super jumps, which can allow you to jump back on a higher floor level, and there is also a short speed boost ability, which allows players to run quicker and potentially cut off other players (There is also a grappling hook ability, that only works in combination with the super jump). All abilities require stamina, which replenishes itself. There are sadly only 3 maps in rotation in Block Arena. These 3 maps are not bad, but the game could have really used some additional content. The lack of players is also definitely a problem. At least the game shows you in the main menu how many other people are online, so that you don't waste your time. Since I feel it is the least scuffed of the shameless Fall Guys Clone Games, it gets a 5.5/10 from me.

So what can we learn from this article? There is taking strong inspiration from other games and there are scuffed clone versions. The first ones can actually still be pretty entertaining, while the seconds ones usually do suck for the most part.