Regular Human Basketball

My instinct is always to ask 'how's the netcode' before anything else, and honestly, for Regular Human Basketball, that question misses the point entirely. This is a 2D physics party game where two teams of up to five players each pilot a giant humanoid mech across six arenas, trying to dunk a basketball. Each mech's thrusters, magnet arm, and all-terrain wheels are mapped to separate players, meaning coordination is the whole game. You want to fire the thruster? That's Dave's button. You need the magnet to grab the ball? That's someone else's problem. The chaos isn't a side effect. It's the product. The mechanical loop is genuinely clever. When it's one-on-one you control every limb yourself, which is already fiddly enough to be funny. Add more bodies to each mech and the coordination overhead explodes in the best way. You can also board the opposing team's mech mid-match and physically disable their thrusters from inside, which is the kind of thing that sounds absurd in a patch note and then becomes the entire highlight reel of your session. Scoring points is hard, which means every basket carries real weight. The physics feel loose and committed at the same time, a two-man Melbourne studio (Powerhoof) clearly understanding that the wobble IS the gameplay. That said, I have to be straight with you about the online situation. The Steam community threads show players waiting 30 minutes in matchmaking without finding a random opponent. This game had a small but enthusiastic audience at launch, and the playerbase has thinned since 2018. Online multiplayer via Steam lobbies works if you bring your own people, but cold-queue matchmaking is effectively dead. Controller setup for local play also has a known ceiling tied to xinput limitations, so getting ten controllers talking happily to one PC can require some planning. None of that tanks the experience if you have a couch and three warm bodies. Where it lands for a shooter-head like me: there's no TTK to optimize, no movement tech to lab out, no ladder anxiety. That's not always what I want, but there's something genuinely refreshing about a multiplayer game that strips all of that away and replaces it with physics, cooperation, and pure situational comedy. The 93 percent positive Steam rating across its review base reflects a small but sincerely delighted crowd. Rock Paper Shotgun called it "some of the most fun you can have with your perfectly normal human pals", and that reads as accurate rather than hype. The 80s hip-hop soundtrack is a legitimately good touch. The commentary system gets repetitive after a while, fair warning. Bottom line is this: buy it with friends already in the group chat, not as a solo punt on finding randoms. The local multiplayer mode is where it lives, the online is a backup for friends who aren't in the same room. Treat it as a sub-five-dollar party tool and it pays off. Treat it as a live-service shooter substitute and you'll be disappointed before the first arena loads.

Fred · Scout Team

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