Bullyparade - DER Spiel

My honest first reaction when I loaded this up was: who exactly is this for? Bullyparade - DER Spiel is a movie tie-in platformer built around the cult German comedy franchise, released in 2017 to coincide with the film's 20th anniversary celebrations. It is not a racing game in any meaningful wheel-and-pedal sense, despite how it gets tagged - think obstacle-course runner with competitive multiplayer rather than anything with lap times or gear shifts. If you are the kind of person who organises Saturday night gaming sessions and needs something everyone can pick up in thirty seconds, the basic control scheme at least clears that bar. Simple inputs, responsive enough movement, and you are off. The roster gives you six playable characters - Chieftain, Blood Brother, Empress, Emperor, Captain Kork, and Mr. Spuck - each voiced by the actual cast including Michael Bully Herbig, Christian Tramitz, and Rick Kavanian. That authentic voice work is genuinely the game's strongest card. If you grew up watching the sketch show, hearing those voices react to your jumps and pratfalls lands well. If you have zero connection to the source material, the jokes are in German and the references will sail straight past you. This is a firmly regional product and it does not pretend otherwise. Level design pulls environments straight from the film's settings - medieval courts, space corridors, and other scenes from the movie's sketch anthology format. Each run tasks you with clearing obstacles, collecting bonuses, and outpacing other players online. The cross-platform multiplayer works, and the online PvP is where any real replay value lives. Solo play exhausts itself fast. The steam version also bundles 1250 in-game diamonds for unlocking items, which is a fair starter pack, though the unlock progression is thin enough that it barely matters long-term. Here is the honest concern for anyone weighing a purchase: there is no local split-screen to speak of, the community is essentially silent since 2017, and online lobbies are going to be a ghost town. For a game that lives or dies on competitive multiplayer, a dead player base is a serious problem. There are no Steam reviews, no Metacritic score, and the Steam discussion board has fewer than ten active threads across its entire lifetime. This is a curio, not a sustained experience. The cartoonish visuals are cheerful enough, the runtime for a single session is genuinely short, and as a low-budget licensed tie-in it was never pretending to be something bigger. If you are German, a long-time Bullyparade fan, and just want a short burst of nostalgia for a few euros, you will get your money's worth in one or two sittings. Everyone else is almost certainly better served elsewhere. Riley, Scout Team

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