Outrage Fight Fest review - knocks your average party game right out

Fighting with your friends is a bad thing, right? A trauma we all experience – first at a young age when someone steals your sandwich or favorite toy, and as time moves on it tends to revolve more around social faux pas and romantic rivalries. We spend most of our lives trying to avoid such things, taking great pains to birthdays and allergies and spouses' names for that very reason. But it takes a mature adult to know that sometimes you need to put all that aside, and beat the snot out of your best pal while wearing a chicken costume. Sometimes you need a game like OutRage: Fight Fest.

I like a game that does one thing and does it really well. In this case, a game that doesn't make you think, or fear, or dwell on life's big questions, but instead makes a really good job of fast-paced slapstick action. OutRage: Fight Fest is a brawler that has come to party. After a brief one-time training round, just to get a feel for the surprisingly nuanced controls and chaotic physics, you're straight in with no messing about. Hop in a call with your pals, load up the game, and within mere minutes you'll be deep into your first round.

Packed with campy wrestling costumes and character names peppered with puns, OutRage is all about squeezing the multiplayer fighting game format for all it's got to give. It's got the chaotic party feel that comes with a number of popular games – Fall Guys or Overcooked, for example – but couples it with genuinely rewarding fights that require a bit of brain as well as brawn. I found that mashing buttons and hoping for the best wasn't the foolproof strategy I had hoped, and instead began to subscribe to high and mighty ideas such as actually pulling off a timed combo.

There are plenty of ways to assert yourself in a fight, from kick and punch combos to grappling your target and throwing them at a concrete wall. Wieldable weapons and assorted items litter the floors, dotted among ramps and pits that form perfect tight corners in which to pin your foe. A three-hit combo sends your friends flying into the air, and if you want to throw a car at them while they're lying prone, who am I to stop you?

As you progress, you'll gather new skills and playable characters, helping you stand out among a chaotic crowd of up to 16 players. As a very tangential side-point that has no real bearing on the game's quality, I love that the female characters actually look strong. I'm bored of battling waifus, I want Rhea Ripley in the ring. The gals in OutRage are well-built and powerful, it's believable when they launch you into a collapsing stack of scaffolding, which ultimately, is what it's all about.

Each game mode offers something different, from traditional battle royale games with everything from an ever-looming wall of death, to Crate Grab, a team game where you have to carry colored crates back to base without getting your head knocked off. My favorite of all the modes was Rage Bank – an all-out free-for-all where the more damage you do, the bigger your reward. You build up rage by laying into your opponents, then race back to a big battery to discharge it all. Get knocked out, and you've wasted all that rage.

The rage mechanic in itself is a wonderful addition. It feels a little like those Hole.io games where you – a sinkhole – swallow more and more items and watch yourself get bigger. Every hit or combo you land bestows rage points upon you, filling up a three-stage meter and making you visibly larger at each interval. Once you reach the final stage, now a towering giant, you can use powerful attacks to take your pals off-guard.

Once I had the games explained to me, I was glad of the quick-fire, no-menu setup between matches, but I think a little instruction as to the rules of each game would come in handy. There's a brief pop-up during the loading screen, but if you've got a decent PC it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it affair. ittedly, this only becomes an issue when you have so much variety in gameplay, so a flaw created by a quality, perhaps. Still, I can imagine a bit of confused running around may eat into what precious little time each round provides.

OutRage: Fight Fest is a game of deceptive depth. The layered combat packs a real punch, and varied quick-fire matches keep things interesting. Characters and upgrades are fun, but won't overpower you, and you'll get a real tactile kick out of landing the perfect combo. It doesn't have infinite replayability, but with the right group of friends it could be a regular hit. The game takes what's good about fighting games and what's good about party games, and smooshes them together in a knuckle sandwich you won't soon forget.