Fall Guys has been pitched as a battle royale of sorts, and while Mediatonic’s game is clearly standing on the shoulders of gaming’s current craze for slowly whittled 100-player match-ups, it borrows far more from madcap game shows than nervy shooters.

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Fall Guys’ Mini-Games

Fall Guys Screenshots 5 IMAGES

Fall Guys’ Challenge

There’s Double Dare’s technicolour palette, and Gladiators’ violent soft-play aesthetic, but above all, there’s the “many become few” mini-game format of Takeshi’s Castle (or MXC if you’re from the US), in which physical games act as an elimination gateway for numerous contestants, getting harder and harder until the final round leaves just a few standing.Fall Guys sees 100 players choose and name a wobbling, top-heavy avatar - think Gang Beasts’ jelly-like protagonists and you’ll get the idea - before being sent through a gauntlet of semi-random games, each ending in a swathe of players being eliminated before the next round begins.I only play 3 of the 30-ish planned mini-games, but it’s immediately clear the concept works. The first is a lift of the ‘Knock, Knock’ game familiar to seasoned Takeshi’s Castle viewers, albeit with the added twist that every contestant plays at once. Players need to run from one end of a course to the other, blocked only by a series of four-door panels. Some doors are real, while others are solid, leading to bumped heads and a short wait as your Guy picks themselves up. Anyone propping up the leaderboard after the race is run is knocked out.The next game gives 50% of the remaining players a balloon tail, while the other half has nothing. Tens of players then scramble around a playground pitted with hiding places and cut across by enormous hammers, aiming to either steal or keep a tail. Anyone with one at the end of three minutes progresses to the next round.To decide the lone winner, we’re presented with an uphill obstacle course, complete with rolling boulders, conveyor belts and climbing sections - the first player to make it all the way up and grab onto a floating crown is proclaimed the overall winner. This will be the only game that appears in every match, but Mediatonic’s aiming to account for boredom and mastery by procedurally generating a new course each time, changing up the appearance and obstacles for every new round.Even with only three human opponents and dozens of bots to play against, each of the games delivered on the giggling scramble the developers are clearly aiming for - the promise of a huge selection of possibilities, and that rush of knowing a personal favourite has popped up, is already a major part of why I’m excited to play more. Mediatonic plans to keep things fresh by releasing new challenges post-release, too. More exciting, however, is the idea of there being 100 humans behind the pads.Apart from the increased challenge of competing against non-AI players, and the potential for mischief that entails, there’s just something inherently fun about knowing the person you’re attacking, annoying, or eliminating is another human being. In fact, it reminds me of another game show (albeit a virtual one). I went into this E3 appointment expecting Fall Guys to act like a comedy battle royale, but came out thinking more about magnificent Xbox Live experiment, 1 vs. 100. Just as that doomed venture turned 100 Xbox Live avatars into combined opponent, score card and schadenfreude vessels, the pleasure of Mediatonic’s game will be in seeing the same names again and again, building compact rivalries over the course of just a few minutes and, hopefully, coming out on top.And that’s also why this definitively doesn’t act like a Battle Royale. Where most other 100-player games rely on tension and gigantic maps, with opponents rarely meeting more than once, Fall Guys stuffs everyone onto a single screen, gives them a set goal, and waits to see who comes out on top, over and again. It might be ridiculous, it might even be unfair, but it will definitely be funny. Sounds like a good game show to me.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK Deputy Editor, and Takeshi's Castle is his favourite. Follow him on Twitter