Those players that haven’t come back to Fall Guys in a while have no better time to do so than right now. With season four finally here, there are a host of new levels to play and costumes to collect. On top of that, there is also an innovative new game mode that lets friends tackle shows together as a team. Squads mode was just added to the game as part of its fourth season, and although it is currently a temporary mode, it may become permanent if it goes over well with the players. For the first time ever, players can truly fall as a team and win as a team.
Fall Guys Season 4 brings players millenniums into the future to the year 4041, and it seems that these beans have finally figured out how to work together. Players can queue up for Squads mode in teams of four, with matchmaking to help fill any empty spaces. Although players could always join a show together, they would inevitably end up competing with one another. Even if friends managed to avoid sabotaging one another throughout the entire show, most of the finals can only have one winner.
Although it seems like some kind of purely team based mode should have been in the game from the start, there’s a lot of nuance to how Mediatonic implemented it properly. In each round, rather than players competing against each other, each remaining squad competes against all the others. At the end of the round, the highest ranked squads will make it through to the next round. This means that a player could finish a race in first place but still not qualify if the rest of their team struggled, but the reverse is also true. Lower skilled players are able to enjoy more of what Fall Guys has to offer when playing with high skill level friends.
In a race, players earn points for their team based on their placement. For example, getting first place in a race will earn the team a huge amount of points, while placing last will only award one point. In survival games, players earn points for as long as they are alive, so it’s important to try and keep the whole team alive as long as possible. While these modes are certainly more interesting in this new light, where the Squads game mode really shines is in how it handles the infamous team matches.
Few things are as notorious in Fall Guys as Team Rounds and Tail Rounds, and don’t even get fans started on the existence of Team Tail Tag. When playing in a large group of random people, Team Rounds can be an absolute nightmare for a number of reasons. For starters, it is way too easy to blame any loss on incompetent teammates, and there’s really no way to judge one’s own competence in the round either. What’s more, it is not impossible for people to sabotage their own team, making things much harder for the player.
There’s also the issue of lack of communication, as players are highly unlikely to have any sort of communication between themselves and other members on the team. This leads to an incohesive mess in which strategy is thrown out the window and winning or losing seems to come down purely to luck. Players can win team rounds by standing still, and they can lose team rounds no matter how hard they try, so they are almost universaly hated. Naturally there are some players that do still enjoy these game modes, but they definitely aren’t popular.
Though many might have thought it impossible, the new Squads mode redeems Team Rounds in surprising ways. As an example of this, it’s helpful to look at how team rounds can now be finals. Previously, the intent was for only one player to leave a show with a crown, but now players can earn crown shards by winning in Squads mode, so the whole team is able to succeed together. Fall Ball can now show up as a final round, where two squads of four players each compete for the win.
Typically, Fall Ball is fairly hectic, and although it can be fun, it suffers from one fatal flaw. After the first few goals are scored, it isn’t uncommon to see a team member quit the match. Once this happens, that team is at a huge disadvantage, causing more and more teammates to quit as a result. This snowballs until one team is left to dominate. In a squad of four where the players are all likely to be communicating, players can finally see what Fall Ball was really meant to be. The same holds true for other team modes as well.
This actually sheds some light on what the real issue with Team Rounds was all along. It wasn’t necessarily that Fall Ball or Egg Siege were fundamentally flawed, and even the concept of Team Rounds worked rather well too, but rather the issue was that players couldn’t choose their teams. When paired up with randoms that they have no connection to, it is inevitably going to be frustrating when a game goes south because of them. By contrast, Squads mode lets players pick their team for the most part, and it’s established beforehand that success will depend on the entire team’s competency.
With a squad full of talented players, there’s a really good shot of making it through to the finals. Thanks to how Mediatonic designed the mode, however, squads with a greater gap in skill still have a chance. It admittedly doesn’t do much for squads with all lower skilled players, but the matchmaking might help with that issue some. All in all, Squads mode is an amazing addition to Fall Guys and actually manages to take one of the game’s worst features and turn it into something fun and enjoyable.
Fall Guys is available now on PC and PS4, and later on Switch and Xbox One.
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