Pooplers

I pulled up Pooplers expecting five minutes of "what even is this" and closed the session an hour later with two friends arguing over who got stuck in a wall. That about sums up the ceiling here. This is a local-only, controller-required party game built around one core loop: crawl around a map as a baby, hold a button to leave a colored trail on the floor, cover more ground than the other three players before time runs out. Think Splatoon stripped of all its mechanical sophistication and replaced with toilet humor and a fart-volume slider in the options menu. That is not entirely an insult. The modes spread wider than you would expect for this budget tier. Free-for-All and Team vs. Team are the main event, both built around floor-coverage percentage. Parents vs. Kids flips one player into an AI-or-human parent role who chases babies down, tosses them in a crib for a timeout, and optionally mops up their mess with a mop, which is actually a clever asymmetric twist. Zombie Defense drops the poop premise entirely and puts babies on rattle-swinging wave survival duty, though that mode is widely considered the weakest of the bunch and requires other humans to play. The soccer mode, where babies waddle around a pitch and fart the ball toward a goal, is genuinely funny for about three rounds and holds up better than the zombie stuff. Power-ups keep the main mode from going completely flat: speed boosts, wider splatter zones, bombs that expand your coverage in one burst, and temporary team-switching items give you just enough to think about between crawls. Here is where I have to be straight with you. The movement is slow, noticeably so, and the babies clip through level geometry with embarrassing regularity. Reviewers across the board flagged babies phasing through walls, getting stuck behind objects, and the parent character occasionally blocking crib exits entirely. Crashes at the character select screen were reported at launch and nobody is patching this aggressively five years in. The visuals are early 2000s PS2 demo disc quality and the sound design is a relentless loop of fart effects that will clear a room inside of twenty minutes. There is no online multiplayer at all. Bots can fill slots for the main pooping mode but Zombie Defense and Football are human-only, so if you are sitting alone you are basically just watching AI crawl around. The honest use case for Pooplers is narrow but real: you have three people physically in the same room, everyone has a controller, the vibe is already low-stakes and silly, and nobody wants to learn rules. In that specific context it delivers a few rounds of genuine chaos and laughter before the novelty ceiling arrives, which it does quickly. The moment you push it past that window or try to run it solo with bots, there is nothing holding it up. No progression, no unlocks outside cosmetics available from the start, no ranked anything. For a shooter specialist who lives in TTK spreadsheets and latency graphs this thing has no business being on my desk, but I have to admit the Parents vs. Kids mode got a real reaction out of a room. That counts for something, even if it counts for not much. Fred, Scout Team