Fall Guys launched today on Steam and PS4, finally giving the players that’d been looking forward to Mediatonic’s party knockout game since its announcement last year a chance to play. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to get all the way to the game – Fall Guys’ servers were quickly overrun by enthusiastic would-be players, to the point that the game became unplayable for some.
Whether this was due to a bigger response than expected, less-optimized servers than needed, or some other reason, it frustrated a lot of people. And, as gamers are apparently wont to do when they’re frustrated, they decided to take that anger out on the game they were so eager to play: people started review bombing Fall Guys just hours after launch, without ever having the chance to play it themselves.
While it’s understandable that a game failing to deliver on promises or botching server-side issues consistently might earn itself a bad review (look no further than Fallout 76 for an example), there’s an important distinction between that and what’s actually happening here – the studio underestimating the response to their game and needing to beef up the servers as a result. The people who were able to get in and play have been enjoying themselves for the most part, so the problem isn’t gameplay.
The Fall Guys official Twitter account has been straightforward about the measures they’re taking to try and get everyone playing as soon as possible, starting from temporarily disabling account creation on PS4 to outright shutting down matchmaking temporarily in order to upscale. They’re trying their best, and as a community, having at least a small grace period for a game that launched less than 24 hours ago seems necessary.
Not all would-be players were so quick to take their rage out on Fall Guys, however. About an hour after posting that they were being review-bombed, the Fall Guys Twitter account noted that the community had responded by spamming positive reviews into Steam instead. This counter-spam averaged the game out to ‘mostly positive’ and left it with over 8,000 reviews and counting on launch day.
