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Living vicariously

Review: Knockout City is the best team-deathmatch game we’ve played in years

Step one: Replace guns with dodgeballs. Steps two through 27: Tweak for madcap fun.

Sam Machkovech | 57
Screenshots from video game Knockout City.
Catching a dodgeball doesn't guarantee success, especially in the case of a special, loudly beeping bomb ball. Don't try to catch it. Just run (or use a dodge-rush to bonk it away). Credit: EA / Velan
Catching a dodgeball doesn't guarantee success, especially in the case of a special, loudly beeping bomb ball. Don't try to catch it. Just run (or use a dodge-rush to bonk it away). Credit: EA / Velan
Screenshots from video game Knockout City.
It's hard to tell, but the receiving player appears to have tapped the "catch" button a smidge too soon. That means they'll whiff and soon take rubber straight to the face.
Screenshots from video game Knockout City.
A tantalizing dodgeball showdown, seen from yellow team's perspective.

Knockout City is the best team-deathmatch game I've played in years. It celebrates and elevates the genre's roots in ways that make me think I've somehow reinstalled my old Voodoo2 GPU. And the game elevates this familiar format all under the guise of family-friendly dodgeball.

I wish describing an online game like that was enough to guarantee its success. But as I've learned over the years, a great online game can fail without a boisterous playerbase, an adept publishing hand, or good reasons for friends to keep playing with each other.

So I'm left with two obstacles: convincing you that Knockout City is worth your time, and convincing you that EA isn't going to get in the way of its success.

Dodgeballin’ after dark

Let's start with all the fun, depth, surprises, and innovations packed into Knockout City, because you might not assume a game about bubbly teenagers throwing dodgeballs has any of that stuff.

Knockout City focuses on team-based deathmatches in a cartoonish metropolis. The default mode, "Team KO," is a three-on-three fight to the dodge-death, and its weapon-and-ammo proposition instantly feels different than most other online combat games.

Freaks & Geeks' classic dodgeball scene. Knockout City is a lot more fun than this, I promise.

Consider how a classic, phys-ed dodgeball game starts. If you can't remember (or if your PTSD prevents you), check out the classic Freaks & Geeks scene in the above video. Two teams on opposite sides. A row of dodgeballs in the middle. A mad dash upon a ref's whistle to rush forward, grab "ammo," and begin pummeling each other in earnest.

Matches in Knockout City begin similarly. Each player starts out empty handed and must immediately rush to find a ball. But instead of a flat gym broken up by a halfway line, Knockout City's arenas are large, asymmetrical, and resemble various city zones. There's a downtown hub full of cars, a construction site, or an empty diner full of rotating doors and platforms. New balls spawn in a few predetermined spots on each map, though these vary enough that you can't necessarily rely on muscle memory to immediately stock your team up. And you can't tuck a second dodgeball into your back pocket, either. Players can only carry one.

Screenshots from video game Knockout City.
Use these warp tubes to quickly move from one end of the map to another.
Screenshots from video game Knockout City.
A giant wrecking ball in the middle of the level doesn't hurt players, but you can still use its bonking powers to control mid-arena showdowns.

Hence, once you throw that dodgeball, getting more ammo immediately becomes imperative (and complicated). This is the first of Knockout City's many intriguing choices and strategies.

ABP: Always Be Passing

Most of Knockout City's best gameplay loops revolve around collaboration. For example, when you pass a dodgeball to a teammate, it lands in their hands at a higher "level," which means that it can be thrown faster. Staying close to teammates, accumulating at least two dodgeballs, and passing them back and forth is a tantalizing power proposition, and it's easily attainable through the course of a match. (If two teammates each hold one ball and one passes to another, this neatly makes teammates pass to each other simultaneously for a double ramp-up.)

In Knockout City, you should abide by the ABP philosophy: Always Be Passing. Tap a button to call for a pass, if your teammate is being stubborn. This will power up the ball in question (and even works with two dodgeballs simultaneously).
In Knockout City, you should abide by the ABP philosophy: Always Be Passing. Tap a button to call for a pass, if your teammate is being stubborn. This will power up the ball in question (and even works with two dodgeballs simultaneously). Credit: EA / Velan

I should clarify a few details before explaining how a suped-up, pass-crazed duo doesn't guarantee victory.

"Knockouts" require whittling down a foe's two hit points or shoving them off a level's edge into a bottomless pit. Most dodgeball attacks take one hit point; some special ones take two hit points and instantly kill. (The first team to score 10 knockouts wins a round; first to two rounds wins a match.) Players can never heal their hit points, not even when they catch a ball thrown directly at them. You have to die and respawn to get both of your hit points back. Once you have line-of-sight on a foe, you can hold down the "throw" button, see your reticule hover over them, and launch the ball as if it were a homing missile. A thrower has the option to curve it left, curve it right, or lob it—which you'll need to do in case your homing-aimed shot would otherwise hit a wall or barrier.

Everyone gets a "catch" button, which temporarily opens your hands to catch (and can be done while already holding a ball). But this tactic also leaves you stunned for a moment if you whiff your timing, and foes can exploit this by pressing a dedicated "fake throw" button. The catch window is wide enough to feel fair, though if you nail a "perfect" timing window, that ball instantly revs up to a higher level of speed for the sake of retaliatory throws right back.

So let's revisit the above situation: two players passing balls back and forth to power their throws up. That's a powerful way to romp through Knockout City, especially if a duo targets an isolated opponent. (Trying to catch two attackers' simultaneous volleys is tricky, timing-wise.) But that also means those players are clumped together on the map.

Screenshot from video game Knockout City.
If your team desperately needs an extra ball, try sacrificing your own body. Look closely, and you'll see the orange "ball" in this picture is actually a player who has bundled into a ball shape, knees tucked to their chest. They've been picked up to use as a freaking weapon.
Screenshot from video game Knockout City.
This instantly doubles your hitting power, though it comes at the cost of your foes possibly catching a teammate and doing great harm as a result.
Screenshot from video game Knockout City.
Instead of throwing a teammate directly, you can charge them up and throw them into the air as a mortar attack.
Screenshot from video game Knockout City.
These explosions only harm foes, not teammates. But they can be dodged by hiding beneath cover.

Now might be a good time to retreat for a couple of reasons. Again, there's no healing, either automatic or via pickups, so you don't necessarily need to rush to knock out an opponent. Second, when your team is short on dodgeballs, you have a trippy option: turn one of your teammates into a throwable ball. Hold down the "roll" button, as seen in the above gallery, and one of your guys will bundle up, knees tucked, in a way that a teammate can pick up. This human-ball option is a "special" dodgeball that does two points of damage when thrown normally, and it can be suped up via passes to a teammate. But it can also be "super-thrown" as a hellfire-from-above crazy ball. The person who gets thrown this way aims their descent.

So if you're facing down two opponents playing hot potato to power up, this is a good option to aim at those two jerks. In fact, the super-throw explosion radius is just big enough to catch such a duo and instantly wipe them both out.

A game rich with memorable, dynamic showdowns

That death-from-above attack is loudly choreographed to foes, however, and they can withstand it by either running away or standing beneath cover. If such an attack misses, your nemeses can use their own dodgeballs to peg the temporarily stunned player once they land. But turning a teammate into a projectile is still one way for you to instantly turn the tables on foes who clump too closely, or it's at least a way to force your foes to scramble and split up so that you might divide and conquer.

Notice how long it took to explain this one showdown possibility borne out of diametrically opposed strategies: one team passing-and-rushing, the other hanging back and launching human-shaped mortar rounds. Each of those is disruptive and can be countered in quick and reasonable fashion. Every time I played Knockout City through its launch weekend, I watched another intriguing strategy situation unfold in a similar vein. The game seems to organically goad players to stick together.

Screenshot from video game Knockout City.
The "cage" ball can temporarily trap a foe in ball form. If you grab them quickly enough, you can use them as a weapon, or toss them into a pit to score an easy point.
Screenshot from video game Knockout City.
The "moon" ball will launch foes into the air and disorient them.

The game's handlers at Velan Studios, which was formed by the founders of legendary studio Vicarious Visions and whose last game was the AR weirdness of Mario Kart Life, have loaded this game with even more thoughtful microtouches. For example, each map gets a randomly selected "special" dodgeball, with its own wacky strategy-shifting effects. A "sniper" ball requires holding the "throw" button to charge an instant straight-line blast, while the "cage" ball temporarily traps anyone who's hit, so that they can be picked up and either used as a weapon or tossed into a bottomless pit for an instant-kill. Those two balls require very different strategies to work: hide-and-snipe with one; rush opponents with an up-close assault with the other. And those are only two of the "special" variations.

When you grab a teammate and throw them, you can elect to aim them directly at a foe with a normal-yet-powerful toss (which is also able to insta-kill). But that option has its own risk-reward issue: should the human ball be perfectly caught, they can either be immediately thrown back at a higher speed, possibly insta-killing you, or they can be tossed into a bottomless pit, should you throw them quickly.

One more notable risk-reward issue unfolds with the "dodge-rush" maneuver. This action not only rolls out of the way of a shot but also smashes into a foe to knock a dodgeball out of their hands. When executed successfully, it changes the scope of one-on-one staredowns. One opponent may hang back and charge their shot (or tap the "fake throw" button to catch a foe off guard), while the other may decide to step forward and get into risky dodge-rush range.

Servers haven’t been hit with a Dodgeball Denial of Service

If three-on-three dodgeball combat isn't enough for you, Knockout City also includes a one-on-one mode. Here, you can see a "battle royale"-like cloud of poison emerge, which happens whenever someone hasn't been knocked out in a round for about 30 seconds. The pacing is just right, in terms of forcing these smaller battles to conclude sooner.
If three-on-three dodgeball combat isn't enough for you, Knockout City also includes a one-on-one mode. Here, you can see a "battle royale"-like cloud of poison emerge, which happens whenever someone hasn't been knocked out in a round for about 30 seconds. The pacing is just right, in terms of forcing these smaller battles to conclude sooner. Credit: EA / Velan

The dodgeball gimmick transforms the deathmatch genre's common assaults into tense risk-reward scenarios, where tables can turn thanks to a slip-up. After playing Knockout City for a bit, I'm surprised something like this has never been done before. Arguably, that's because the resulting game doesn't work as a first-person shooter. Mobility matters, and Knockout City requires perfectly timed catches, dodges, jumps, and shifts behind cover, which are all easier to manage via the game's third-person perspective. If you prefer mouse-and-keyboard for such antics, by all means! But the mix of mobility, auto-homing throws, and perilous pits ensures that precise mouse aiming factors less into your success. Cross-platform multiplayer may never be fairer.

Here, EA has stepped in as a publisher to pull off a remarkable feat—Knockout City has the game industry's best cross-platform multiplayer I've seen. Already in this game's brief lifespan, I have partied up with friends across the console-and-PC wastelands with nary an issue. Xbox, PlayStation, and PC can coexist in a single party, as managed by an in-game friends list that straight-up works. There are no obnoxiously long friend codes or other hogwash. Expect to remain partied up for hours-long dives inside Knockout City's matchmaking.

I cannot stress enough how valuable this quality is in a gaming universe so fractured by platforms. And in practice, Knockout City is much more fun with friends than with randos. Velan did their best to add button-tap options to talk to teammates ("pass to me," "throw me"), but I have a much better time convincing cross-platform friends to join me and succeed via voice comms than to deal with randomly matchmade teammates who have no idea how to tap the "pass" button.

This should not be confused with the industry's best connectivity outright, as I've run into a small-but-noticeable number of hiccups (like when one party member gets booted from a match). Yet even in these cases, I've been able to get those cross-platform friends reconnected to a match in progress and go on to win.

Unfortunately, I can't be sure whether EA and Velan's networking teams will be as good at stemming an inevitable flood of cheaters. Because once PC players are rolled into a console matchmaking ecosystem, the cheaters are soon to follow. One of EA's biggest free-to-play games, Apex Legends, continues to face a cat-and-mouse game of cheaters, especially within its entry-level matchmaking.

A promising economy to start, with the usual post-launch apprehension

This might be where a $20 cost of entry eventually figures into Knockout City's long-term health.

As of press time, the entirety of Knockout City is free on all supported platforms. It launched on May 21 as a free and fully unlocked game, and this testing period runs until Sunday, May 30. Want to check the Nintendo Switch version's frame rate, resolution, cross-plat support, and network performance, before paying its normal $20 price? Go ahead: it runs at a mostly locked 60 fps, with its simple-and-crisp art style scaling well to the weaker Switch hardware. Want to test it on your best or worst PC? By all means, and you can additionally see how it's handed off from your preferred storefront to the goofy EA Origin launcher.

Once the trial period ends, you'll either need to buy the game or join a participating subscription service (and anything you earned playing the game for free will stay in your account for whenever you pay up). The game comes as part of EA's base "EA Play" subscription tier, and that also makes it an instant unlock on Xbox Game Pass. Among other things, this instantly creates a hurdle for cheaters, since you can't get caught cheating in this game, then spin up a new dummy free-to-play account. Yet Knockout City's inclusion in popular, paid subscription plans, mixed with the aforementioned cross-plat networking support, is likely good news for a healthy playerbase for the months to come.

Screenshot from video game Knockout City.
"No loitering."
Screenshot from video game Knockout City.
"Why don't you take a picture? It'll last longer."

The only thing that cannot necessarily be proven out during this limited-time test is EA's plans to further monetize the game. So far, the game only has two types of virtual currency. One of those, "style chips," cannot be bought with real-world money at this time. The other type, "holobux," is so far very easy to earn inside the game, and the $20 purchase includes an additional small pile of it. Both of these currencies apply entirely to cosmetics right now, and the gameplay has zero apparent hooks where a pay-to-win feature might creep in.

I'm of two minds about cosmetic microtransactions. I hate them as a psychological carrot-dangle, but I also understand that they're a path for experimental and emergent games to keep the lights on and pay the bills. I can live with the compromise of a low cost of entry with a less predatory cosmetics-for-cash plan, instead of being wholly free to play while shoving virtual bucks down our throats. So far, Knockout City gets this right—and I've already been charmed by how varied and detailed each of these cosmetics has turned out. If EA can hold the line on this slew of currencies and cosmetics while also making clear to players that $20 delivers a mix of guaranteed gameplay and a reasonable path towards cosmetic options, then I'm on board.

But game publishers have a history of changing this rulebook within a few weeks after a "review period" runs out, sneaking more ways to part gamers from their cash after critics have moved on. EA should tread very carefully here. Don't charge $20 up front and then design an insidious "never stop spending money" ecosystem later, y'all.

We’ve seen this sales pitch before—and yet we haven’t

Knockout City launch trailer

I wish my high praise for this game—as shared by all of my recent clanmates, who have all gotten hooked since Friday's launch—was enough to guarantee a new online game's success. Over the past decade, the marketplace has voted otherwise.

Many games have come and gone with varying amounts of "old-school PC deathmatch" cred. Some have loudly aped the classics, like 2017's PWND as a shameless Quake 1 Rocket Arena clone. Others have tried to combine shooter tropes with other genres, particularly last year's awkwardly named (and, uh, published by EA) Rocket Arena (not to be confused with the aforementioned Q1 mod, since it plays much more like Smash Bros.). Still other games couldn't make up their mind about how exactly to resemble first-person deathmatch games of old, like Cliff Blezsinski's tragic Lawbreakers.

In all of those cases, announcing a team's old-school credentials or having a game look much like a '90s classic usually missed the point. My favorite classic networked-PC games didn't keep me hooked to LAN parties because they had chunky polygons, rocket launchers, or WASD allegiance. They worked because they brought teams together with reasons to strategize. Every creative decision big and small in Knockout City incentivizes tight, collaborative team gameplay, and that resembles my favorite Quake mods much more than bloody, low-poly gibs at an insanely high FOV.

Knockout City's roadmap also includes compelling reasons to keep dodgeballin', including a beefed-up four-on-four mode (as teased by certain in-game goals) and a reward-filled "league" matchmaking system meant to emphasize the game's built-in "clan" matchmaking option. Again, these clans work with the game's default cross-platform support, making it all the easier to get notifications when friends from other consoles are playing at the same time you are.

In a dreamier Knockout City, EA and Velan would unlock the game's engine on PC for the sake of modding, because the core mechanics are so beautifully crafted. Imagine an entire community building modes, levels, and tweaks for a game that replaces guns with dodgeballs and makes the acts of throwing those balls (with easily controlled arcs and curves) and teaming up with friends so satisfying. This would be a fantastic way to reward the Knockout City community's investment, since you're asking them to spend $20 anyway, EA. Default "league" matchmaking and a grind for cosmetics will still be there for you to profit off, while modding tools, with the cushion of cross-plat connectivity, would ensure this incredible multiplayer ecosystem lives on.

Already, an easy call for my year-end list

Pressing the "catch" button at the right time leads to a supercharged response throw. And if I may offer a groan-worthy analogy, Knockout City is Velan Studios' perfectly timed "catch" of a game. Go ahead, groan.
Pressing the "catch" button at the right time leads to a supercharged response throw. And if I may offer a groan-worthy analogy, Knockout City is Velan Studios' perfectly timed "catch" of a game. Go ahead, groan. Credit: EA / Velan

I'm not holding my breath for EA to do such a thing, though I hope they keep it in mind as a one-year-later, keep-fans-engaged surprise. But simply measuring what Velan Studios has crafted thus far—after a reportedly massive development time of four years—has blown me off my feet, as if I caught a high-speed dodgeball.

Knockout City is a blast for tried-and-true online combat fans, thanks to its mix of instantly intriguing and powerful abilities and rock-paper-dodgeball strategy pivots. It's also an incredibly easy recommendation for kids and families, since it finally cracked the nut of an "online shooter" that offers the fun of a gun game without in any way resembling gunplay. Its cartoony aesthetic has grown on me, too, thanks to an art team that has balanced simple geometry with bold, enticing designs in a very Nintendo-like way.

Assuming EA doesn't screw this up in the months to come, expect Knockout City to land on my list of 2021's best games of the year.

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