Beat Me!

I went looking for a real online match in Beat Me! and what I found was a waiting lobby and a lot of patience I don't have. That experience pretty much tells you everything you need to decide whether this game belongs in your library right now. It's a physics-based puppet brawler for up to six players, set in a fantasy world called Puppetionia, with a handful of characters ranging from tanky golems to flimsier ranged types, spread across a pool of trap-heavy 2D arenas. The pitch is simple: button-mash your way to last-puppet-standing across Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes, with a co-op Wave mode rounding out the roster. On paper, fine. In practice, the cracks open fast. The physics combat system is the core selling point, and it is also the core problem. What the developers call a "special physics-based combat system" translates to sluggish, floaty movement with noticeable input lag between pressing a button and seeing your puppet actually do something. There is essentially one attack button and one special attack tied to a power-up you grab mid-match, which means depth is thin. Power-ups drop from the sky during fights, including a floaty-jump buff, a control-reversal debuff you can saddle opponents with, and the yellow super-attack pickup that provides the only real moment of tactical decision-making in any given round. Character balance is rough too: tankier fighters like the golem feel overtuned, while ranged characters struggle to compete with the melee focus of the combat. Blocking is in the game, but it still takes damage, which makes it functionally pointless. The offline local experience is where Beat Me! gets closest to delivering on its premise. Shared-screen with three or four people in the same room, the chaos of the physics and the environmental traps produces genuinely funny moments. Rounds end in seconds when someone falls off a platform, which keeps energy high if everyone's in a good mood and low if you're trying to take it seriously. Wave mode, where players co-operate against endless enemy waves, is present in local play but absent online, which is an odd call. There is no bot support for local Deathmatch either, meaning solo players have nowhere to go except Wave mode, and that gets brutal fast on your own. Online is a different story altogether. The player population has been sparse since launch and, years on, finding a random match takes long enough that it basically doesn't happen without pre-arranged friends. Cross-platform support between PC and Xbox is a positive on paper, but it doesn't help much when the combined pool is this small. When you do get a match running, the netcode holds up tolerably, but with only Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch available online versus the fuller local offering, the mode count feels deliberately stripped. The visuals have a cartoonish, colorful look that holds up fine at any resolution, and the puppet theme gives the arenas some personality, but 100-plus levels means very little when the combat loop runs out of steam so quickly. This is a game for a very specific Friday night: four people in the same room, controllers in hand, expectations appropriately low. Anyone coming to it solo or hoping to grind ranked strangers will be disappointed. The bones of something charming are here. They just needed more meat on them. Fred, Scout Team