GameCentral goes hands-on with a new co-op dungeon crawler from UK studio Glowmade, which blends The Running Man with the goofy energy of Fall Guys.
When so many games use bland, vacuous words like ‘Immortals’ or ‘Forsaken’ in their titles, King Of Meat lands like a sweet dose of dumb relief. It’s even better when tied to its premise, as the name of a broadly satirical game show where you fight for fame and fortune in a mystical fantasy land and turn monsters into literal slabs of meat.
Throw in giant stomping horse power-ups and slapstick friendly fire, and you’ll have a good idea of what makes King Of Meat tick. This is a co-op dungeon platformer for up to four players, where you hack, slash, bomb, shove, and fling your way across various level gauntlets littered with minor puzzles, enemies, and platforming obstacles. Multiplayer silliness is the prime objective, but the robust suite of customisation options, including level creation tools, is intended to give it staying power beyond the initial goofs.
The quirkiness behind King Of Meat tracks with the history behind its developer, Glowmade. The studio was founded by veterans from fellow Guildford-based outfit Lionhead Studios, best known for Fable, including co-founder Jonny Hopper who also worked at Media Molecule as a lead programmer and narrative designer on PlayStation’s cuddly platformer LittleBigPlanet.
Founded in 2015, Glowmade created 2017’s WonderWorlds under publisher Tequila Works, while their planned second project, an EA Original joint named Rustheart, was cancelled while they were developing an early version of King Of Meat on the side. When Amazon Games became attached, a publisher known for online role-player’s like Lost Ark and New World, King Of Meat expanded and grew into something with bigger ambitions.
In comparison to Amazon’s recent slate, this is a very light and breezy experience. During our play session, alongside the developers and other media, we ran through several levels of varying difficulty, with the final product promising over 100 levels at launch. Every level we played was based around a specific theme, including throwable bombs, platform runs across bouncy pads, and dislodging stuck cogs with projectiles, all while taking on enemy waves and collecting treasure to boost the collective score.
To achieve the highest scores, a certain level of team coordination and speed is required, but it doesn’t feel punishing. High scores are locked behind your ability to stay alive, your overall time, how much treasure you collect, and how ‘stylishly’ you kill enemies to please the crowd – which mostly equates to using special moves tied to cooldown meters. In practice, between four players, this means leaning on chaotic hijinks, with plenty of disembodied horse stomps from the sky and gassy belches launching enemies across rooms.
It’s pitched as a co-op game, but there’s a level of competition between your teammates. The end of every level presents you with individual scores, while the haphazard physics and colliding attacks mean you can get easily caught in the crossfire, or sent hurtling into a pit below. During our time though, it never felt frustrating despite the chaos, with everything being forgivable enough where giving a teammate an ‘accidental’ shove is just part of the fun.
The combat itself is simplistic and enjoyably messy, with charge-up attacks, ground pound manoeuvrers, and other weapon-specific attacks depending on what you have equipped – including weighty sausage hammers and super-fast pixelated swords. These weapons provide some differentiation in terms of character builds, but we’re not entirely convinced the combat mechanics are deep enough to sustain the repeat runs the scoring system is aiming for.
The longevity, in this aspect at least, will likely hinge on the appeal of the weapons, item buffs, and gear you can buy using in-game currency within the Splatoon-like plaza, along with the planned post-launch updates.
If you’re worried the game will fall into the usual live service trappings, Glowmade stresses this is not the case. ‘The game at launch is mid-priced premium, you’re going to get 30-40 hours of gameplay straight out of the box, we’re making sure of that,’ Jonny Hopper, Glowmade CEO, told us.
‘There’s no pay-to-win,’ he added. ‘There is obviously progression in the game but it’s not related to a battle pass. We said we don’t want to do a battle pass.’
The decision to avoid a battle pass progression model is becoming a trend with newer live service games, as shown recently with Concord. ‘I think people are getting tired of that stuff because it has become a bit samey,’ Hopper said.
‘It didn’t feel right to us, because why do we need to do that? We’ve got a great game, let’s just allow people to play it, enjoy it, and stick about for a while because they are enjoying the process of playing, or enjoying the process of creating and the community behind that. Those are the actual key things that’s going to keep people playing.’
King Of Meat is hoping to replicate LittleBigPlanet’s creative spirit with its built-in level creator. While we couldn’t go hands-on with the tools, we were told all the levels within the base campaign can be designed using the same toolset. For the developers themselves, it was about building something where it’s actively difficult to design a real stinker.
‘We’ve expressly designed the tools so it’s hard to make something bad,’ said Jim Unwin, project lead at Glowmade. ‘That’s very much our approach. A lot of us are from art backgrounds, and I think a lot of us have had that experience [of] picking up a new tool and [going] ‘everything I do is s***’. I think that’s a really off-putting and unnecessary step when you’re trying to help people be creative.
‘With create mode, it was very much, ‘How can we get you to make something fairly decent, almost by accident?’ And then take it on from there. You can make something which is awful, but you’d have to make an effort to do that.’
King Of Meat isn’t shy about its inspirations, with the developers citing 1987 action film The Running Man and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth specifically, but it’s an amalgamation which could find an audience through its distinct personality. It remains to be seen whether the gameplay loop can carry its ambitions, but for now, this is Amazon’s most promising venture yet.
Formats: PC (previewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch
Publisher: Amazon Games
Developer: Glowmade
Release Date: TBA
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