6/24/2023 0 Comments Knockout city review![]() The speed at which matches flow is insane, with a series of rapid-fire shots, especially with the multi-ball, another one of your special dodge-balls, where you can easily lose track of where an incoming ball is coming from. You can also pass the ball to teammates, pre-charging it for a quick shot, making teamwork a crucial instance of reliability. You can even fake a shot as well, making your target less inclined to know when you are about to launch it at them. As just mentioned, charging a shot is the key to dealing damage, as while you can instantly toss the ball, charging it gives it more speed, making it less likely they will have time to catch your shot and return it back to you, with interest. You and your fellow dodge-brawlers can also form into a ball themselves to be tossed, and should you hold down the button to charge your shot, you can perform a special attack that has you dropping like a missile from up top. These unique dodge balls have gravity effects, explode, or can trap enemies into a caged ball for a quick toss over a cliff unless they slam down the escape button rapidly and try to distance themself away from your grasp. The titular dodge “balls” are found in specific locations around each arena, with each match being privy to a specialty ball. Here, levels feel tailor-made to get the most out of every square inch. ![]() Often, most multiplayer games have levels that often never see use in their full size, making parts of each environment feel more like set dressing than serving a function. There are key chokepoints and locations you’ll often find skirmishes, but I never found that battles would only exist in key locations. Still, the levels are big enough that you can roam around to find approaching battles and small enough that you don’t have to roam far. Well, that and several other reasons that put me off the game entirely. The levels are spacious, and one of the things I noticed about them right away, was that they never fell victim to spawn killing, which was one reason I simply stopped playing Bleeding Edge. Knockout City is a three on three game of dodgeball, except that instead of two teams on each side of a do-not-cross line, you move freely around construction zones, rooftop battles, slimy sewers, busy streets, and a 50’s diner themed battleground. As bad as the pun is, the ball is in EA’s court on how to take this franchise forward. And, if the game is promoted enough and hits a certain audience on Twitch, or whathaveyou, then the game could see a very healthy community supporting it for years to come. While it’s impossible to tell the shelf life of what Knockout CIty will have, despite its day-one working crossplay and progression across all its available platforms, the game does a tremendous amount right that makes me think that while I don’t see it being a massive runaway success like something like Fallguys, I can see it becoming at least popular enough so that developer Velan Studios can continue to add to it, adding more maps, modes, and more customization items to deck out your would-be dodge-brawler. It’s a sports-infused game about high-flying dodgeball, with pinging the ball off someone’s dome feeling as addictive as anything else gaming has to offer. ![]() Thankfully, Knockout City doesn’t rely on classes, hell, it doesn’t really even have combat in the general sense. ![]() And, if you are at the mercy of joining with random players, then your experience is likely to suffer as a result. Where many of these games suffer is usually through their combat, classes, and the rinse and repeat loop of needing a class-focused team to play with, often putting people into certain roles and needing that teamwork to well. Hell, this isn’t even EA’s only one in the past year with Rocket Arena itself being not much more than an afternoon blip before it simply vanished from the conversation. Those few rounds became hours, and those hours became days, illustrating to me that I was very wrong about Knockout City, and I am likely not the only one.Ĭombat Arena games often come and go. With the title being available on Gamepass and EA Play, and of course a free trial for its first ten days of its release, I decided to at least pop in for a few rounds and see if it was any good. The trailer just didn’t do it for me, and I had already seen the likes of Ninjala, Bleeding Edge, and Destruction AllStars each crash and burn, trying to find their way into an already crowded multiplayer space. Initially revealed during a Nintendo Direct presentation this past February, I dismissed Knockout City almost instantly.
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