Drunken Wrestlers 2

I don’t know why, but there’s something incredibly enjoyable about fighting games with rag doll physics. Gang Beasts will always have a place in my heart but when brother said he’d found a fun fighting game, of course we all had to join in. Drunken Wrestlers 2 is a free-to-play early access game on Steam with characters that are just as drunk and derpy as the ones from Gang Beasts.

Gameplay is quite simple. You move around with WASD, sprint with Shift, block with Space and attack with the arrow keys. But you have to target who you are fighting with Left Alt, so you can attack them. That doesn’t stop you from kicking and hurting anyone who happens to be between you and your target. You have to punch and kick your enemies to death, earning points for each hit, block and kill you make.

If you’re lucky, you can decapitate each other or even cut each other in half. I’m not sure how you do that though, you just sort of have to hit people in the right angle. If you’re unlucky, you’ll lose a foot and spend a long time on the ground, waiting to die because you can’t stand up any more. Any injury aside from leg injuries is alright – you can still fight even if you have no head (although you quickly lose health). But losing a leg or foot will mean you can’t stand up and are basically useless until you die and respawn.

Frankly that doesn’t matter though. Dying doesn’t matter at all because the insane physics and loss of limbs is so damn hilarious. It would be nice if players could respawn standing up (and maybe not in the middle of a fight) but if there’s more than 2 players, it’s generally complete carnage anyway.

There are two big issues though. The first is getting up. If you fall down, which is insanely easy to do, it takes forever to get up. If you fall down against a wall, then it takes even longer. Sometimes you just don’t get back up at all.

The second issue is that the camera is pretty atrocious at times. You’re always focused on whoever you’re attacking so you have little control over the camera. Fine when you’re both in the middle of the map. Awful when you’re both up against a wall or something.

Of course, being free-to-play and early access means that the game can be quite glitchy. And I’m not talking about the custom stuff. The base game mode and the base map are both very basic, but we’ve had glitches in those. The biggest one was all four of us in a match having a broken HUD, unable to see each other’s actual health. Actually, I don’t even think we were taking any damage at all, but we couldn’t recreate the bug. There are also quite a few server bugs. It’s quite easy to find yourself having to reset the game because it thinks there’s no servers or matches available.

The biggest drawback in the game though is performance. Even on my laptop, which is a pretty good laptop, I was having framerate drops and lag spikes, and at once point all four players were struggling to actually see what was going on. And that’s with blood off. If you turn blood on, especially the flowing blood when you get a wound, the game grinds down to a halt.

That’s fine though. You can just turn the settings down to “Potato”. You’ll still get framerate drops but removing the blood fixes most of the performance problems. Most of them.

As for Pay-to-Win stuff? There currently isn’t anything like that. No shop or anything. There will be a shop in the future, but right now the sole developer funds the game by asking you to buy the soundtrack. Doing so gets you some new cosmetics and a custom title, but that’s it. And the soundtrack is actually pretty good, but it’s not my cup of tea. I assume there’ll be more things to buy later, especially since you can earn levels and money by playing public matches, but for now, the only thing to buy is the soundtrack.

But really, it’s best playing this sort of game with people in real life. Playing with random people online is nowhere near as fun. At the very least, get everyone on voice chat or Discord or something. Because there’s a leveling system (and probably more features later on), things get too competitive and you can’t really communicate with randoms, if only to say “give me a second to get up” or “please kill me I can’t walk!”. But more importantly, you need to be able to hear each other’s laughter, because that’s what makes Drunken Wrestlers 2 so good.

So yeah, you should grab some friends and play this game. It’s hilarious.