Blowhards

I'll be straight with you: I came to Blowhards looking for something I could recommend to the competitive crowd, and I'm leaving with a much narrower audience in mind. This is a local-only, controller-required party brawler built around knocking opponents off platforms, and it does exactly that one thing without pretending to be more. If you walked in expecting online ranked play, netcode discussion, or any kind of skill ceiling worth grinding - wrong game, wrong night. What Blowhards actually offers is a four-player local scrap between two characters, Noot and Toot, across a handful of world-landmark stages. The core loop is range-based: you're firing air blasts to shove opponents off ledges rather than whittling down a health bar, which gives it a push-physics feel closer to TowerFall Ascension than anything in the Smash family - though the developers themselves cite both as inspiration. Shooting, blocking, and supercharging form the basic toolkit, with power-up pickups adding short bursts of chaos to each round. The mode list covers free-for-all deathmatch, King of the Hill, team variants, and Nootball - a mode added post-launch in a free summer update that also brought taunts. A level editor rounds out the content, letting you build and share custom stages, which is a genuinely decent feature for a game at this price point. The problem is that the content ceiling is low. Two playable characters with three skin options each is not a roster - it's a prototype. There is zero online play, which in 2017 was already a limiting decision and in 2026 makes this almost entirely dependent on whether you have people physically in the room with you. No Steam reviews exist to cross-check community longevity, and the Metacritic page has been empty since launch. This is not a game with a living community. It is a game you install the night friends come over, play for an hour, and probably never reinstall. For what it is - a budget couch game with a clean gimmick, working controller support, and a level editor - Blowhards is competently made by a six-person Swedish indie team who clearly cared about filling a gap. The air-blast knockback mechanic keeps rounds short and readable, which is actually the right call for a casual party setting. Casual players who just want something to throw on a TV with controllers in hand will get genuine laughs out of it. Anyone expecting depth, roster variety, or the ability to play solo or online will hit a wall in the first session. Fred, Scout Team