Knockout City would probably be pretty boring and forgettable if all you could do was throw the ball and catch it. As you might imagine, there’s really not much you can do sometimes when you find yourself at the wrong end of a gang attack and have two balls being hurled at you at the same time. In these situations, you may end up just leaving yourself vulnerable if you’re spamming the catch button too much. Also, the window for catching the ball when you press the button is not that large, so you can get into trouble when trying to anticipate someone throwing a ball at you from close range. It’s imperative to use some stealth, deception, or teamwork when launching balls at an opponent.Ī helpful cursor tells you when a ball is coming at you and from which direction, but it can still be a challenge to get yourself squared up to the ball to catch it in time before it nails you. The core of the game, and it’s one that that works remarkably well, lies in the cat-and-mouse play of trying to hit someone without them catching it. It’s this element that really allows the game to transcend its shooter roots as it would basically be like if you could actually catch bullets when they were fired at you in other shooters - there’s even a “perfect” timing window on catches that allows you to rocket throws back at opponents at increased speeds. You still need to be somewhat judicious about when to unleash the fury as balls can easily be stopped from hitting their target by all of the walls and obstacles scattered throughout the various environments.Īside from powering up your shot and slinging balls at others with reckless abandon, the other key component of the game is catching. You can’t go around gunning balls willy-nilly though. What might be divisive among some players is that balls are aimed automatically at opponents when they are thrown, which inherently eliminates the skill of lining up a shot that many have become accustomed to employing from playing shooters over the years. The first team to 10 knockouts (which are essentially kills that will have the knocked out then respawn on the map) wins the round, and best two out of three rounds wins the match. There are several spots on the map where balls are located at the outset, and they will respawn in these same locations once they fall off a map. The main online mode in the beta had people playing in squads of three across a few different rotating maps. Yes, there’s still a ball and there are still teams, but things get a little crazy from there. Though the basics may be the same, there are a lot of exciting new rules and maneuvers that need to first be learned and then honed in this game. Then came the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story in 2004, which aside from teaching us all the valuable 5 D’s of dodgeball, also brought with it a set of rules that were to new to me that featured players bringing back an eliminated teammate by catching a ball.Īll of this is to say that Knockout City isn’t your grandfather’s brand of dodgeball. In essence, this meant your team could essentially attack from both sides. When I was a kid an indeterminate amount of time ago and we would play dodgeball out in the schoolyard, the rules of the court were if you got hit and eliminated, you would become a “cow” and try to hit the opposing team from behind them. Let’s break down some of the things that stood out from the limited amount of time I had with Knockout City and consider how the developers can adjust the game prior to its release on May 21. It has a lot of potential to tweak the existing framework and implement new elements that could continue to keep the gameplay from getting too stale. This probably played to the game’s advantage though because now my first impressions of Knockout City are that it’s a fresh and frenetic twist on a cross-platform shooter.
I don’t think many folks were necessarily clamoring for a dodgeball video game in 2021, so expectations were low when EA and Velan Studios opened the closed beta version of Knockout City on Steam.
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