Amazon's next game is a co-op dungeon crawler that desperately wants to be Roblox
Last year, we wrote about how every new live service shooter starts with its own distinct aesthetic before inevitably succumbing to Cosmetic Uglification, when tie-ins and collaborations result in a game overrun by "a clown show of brands." Impressively, the next game Amazon is publishing, King of Meat, has decided to skip over this painful process by starting with an incomprehensible aesthetic mishmash from day one.
This is Jackson Pollock: Gamer's Edition, a grab bag of random ideas and systems smashed together in the hopes of reverse-engineering why Roblox prints a million dollars a day. The core setup: a four-player co-op game in which you make your way through short dungeons, smacking braindead enemy mobs with light three-hit weapon combos and solving a few puzzles like "stand on the button" or "pull the lever on that platform" to progress. The theming: a game show, complete with sarcastic announcers commenting on what happens as you go. (The developers describe it as "joyfully unhinged," which mainly means there are some trite jokes about commercialism in this game published by a two trillion-dollar company.)
Because the conceit of the game is, and I quote, "where high fantasy meets the glitz, glamour, and media-infatuation of modern-day celebrity," King of Meat's developers seemingly gave themselves carte blanche to say yes to every possible aesthetic choice. Let's get some wizard stuff in there. Some samurais. Guitar swords. 1990s Chicago Bulls jerseys. Soda machines (remember commercialism!!) and spraypaint. Black hole powers. Exploding rubber duckies. A smelly breath attack. A big horse hoof that comes down from the sky and smashes things.
Put another way, King of Meat is that Key & Peele Gremlins 2 sketch: "You mean a gremlin with leathery wings just flying around flip-flopping bust through a wall make a perfect bat symbol in the wall get outside get in some wet concrete jump up on a building and just dry in place like a gargoyle gremlin? We are cooking with gas now I love it it's in the movie. Next!"
The crucial distinction is that Gremlins 2 gives off genuine cocaine-fueled gonzo energy, while King of Meat's wackiness is a facade for how derivative everything is underneath the surface.
That may sound crueler than I mean it to be, but my first impression was that King of Meat looked like the parody game that a parody version of Amazon would make in, I don't know, The Boys or something. My feelings did soften once I played it: the combat is fine, serviceable in the way light co-op games often are. As you level up your character you'll unlock some extra combo attacks and character abilities that do meaningfully change what you're capable of, though still within the realm of a simple hack-and-slash. A new downward strike, a charged dash stab, that sort of thing. I'll give King of Meat credit for not basing its entire progression system around gear drops that give you 1% bonuses to your stats.
I did experience a few bugs that slowed down the action—things like enemies getting stuck walking into a wall somewhere halting progress until we killed them, my character's animations breaking after I pressed the wrong combination of buttons, being randomly barred from using one of the two special abilities I equipped prior to a match. They were minor issues I expect will be fixed, but I don't think there's any saving what is fundamentally a game with so little oomph to its combat or stakes.
It's popcorn light, seasoned with a whole shaker's worth of "so random!" humor. Fortnite may be a Cosmetic Uglification superspreader, but underneath the Gokus and Thanoses running around its "metaverse" there's at least a shooter with substantial depth and an even higher skill ceiling with on-the-fly building. The best-case scenario for King of Meat is being the kind of game you and your Discord friends drop into when you don't want to play anything that requires more than 20% of your active attention.
If you're already mostly tuned out, its aesthetic mishmash probably just becomes the same kind of background noise as an ad break on cable TV. Brain calibrated to bare minimum engagement, I think it would be a fine enough game to mash your way through. But there's no compelling hook here to get people on board, which makes me almost certain that King of Meat's big pitch—that players can build and upload their own levels, and all the official levels were made using those very same tools—is doomed from the jump.
People bought Super Mario Maker because they like Mario, not because they like the abstract idea of making a 2D platformer. Trying to launch a user generated level-based game from ground zero has the same cart-before-horse failure rate of declaring a new FPS an esport before normal people have even decided if they like it or not. I just can't see this one tempting the kiddos away from whatever much wilder stuff they're building in Roblox. For everyone else over the age of 20, you've already seen everything here too many times to find any nourishment in this meat.