“It looks like a rip-off Fall Guys but Sonic,” said my 11-year-old as I clicked on the Steam page for Sonic Rumble. “Seriously, if you told me that was a new Fall Guys skin, I’d believe you. When’s the court case?” My tweenager’s sass aside, it seems he’s not the only one receiving the latest outing from Sega rather disapprovingly. Steam players are slamming the game as “incredibly predatory” and describing it as “a microtransaction slopfilled nightmare.”
After a while with the game, I can confirm all of the above, and most of all my boy’s prescient comments. Good grief, this is the most blatant Fall Guys knock-off, from the randomized round selection for each of the three knock-out events to the mixture of round styles (race to the end, survive the longest, collect the most stuff) and the podium of players where you see those being eliminated. The only mistake was not to copy a couple of rather important Fall Guys elements:
- To have excellent, visibly coherent course layouts.
- To be good.
Because as much as it’s a woeful copy, and as much as it bombards you with ways to spend money, the most egregious issue with the game is that it’s just dreadful. The levels feel chaotic in all the wrong ways (and I stress this isn’t my failing—I came top three in all but one of the rounds I played in, and won many), with the visual incoherence making the courses feel like just meaningless noise. Making matters worse, half the time control is taken away from you as you’re flung along Sonic-like pipes and loop-the-loops. However, when you’re not being propelled along those paths, you feel irritatingly leaden for a game based on the blue blur.
The magic of Fall Guys is in how clumsy the characters feel, their wobbly, drunken movements a core part of the challenge in the obstacle courses. But Sonic Rumble has none of that, instead opting for just irritating slowness. Fall Guys makes me laugh when things go wrong. Sonic Rumble makes me sad.
Before we get onto just how much this free-to-play game wants you to spend your cash, I do want to dispel one myth that is spreading throughout the Steam reviews. There are a lot of people claiming the game is “pay to win,” and this absolutely isn’t the case. It’s confusing, because it certainly implies that in its very poor communication about what various add-ons do provide, only talking about how they can improve your “score.” And given that, you know, rounds are scored, people’s inaccurate reaction is perfectly understandable. Store descriptions typically read, “Allows you to level up your Buddies and Skins. Enhancing them increases your Score Bonus, making it easier to get higher scores during battles.” What it actually impacts is how many rings you win after you’ve taken part in an event, which are then spent on more skins, poses, emojis, trails and most excitingly of all, background colors for your name. Again, none of these change anything about how you play.
Meanwhile, alongside the golden rings you win by playing are red rings you buy with your real-world money, to exchange for the far cooler-looking cosmetics. I really love the choice of a red ring for this, given their near-universal semiotic understanding—from traffic signs to broken Xboxes—as a warning sign. And oh my GOD, the prices for these skins. I genuinely had to check twice because I was sure I’d made a mistake, but no, most skins cost 999 red rings (currently “discounted” to 729 for the first month of the game), and 770 rings will cost you—prepare yourself—$46. Right now, to get 999 red rings would require buying the $46 collection of 770, and then a $20 pack of 330 rings, meaning the regular skin price is a gobsmacking $60.
That’s the price of a whole game. For a skin. Fuck right off.
And they are but a single way to spend your cash! There’s a bemusing range of battle passes to buy as well, including the main Premium Pass for $10 or the Premium Pass+ for $20, a $9 Halloween 2025 Event (that ends in 8 days), and a Sonic 3 Crossover Event pass (quite how it’s “crossing over” with last year’s movie is not made clear) for another $9. And that’s to say nothing of the full-screen pop-ups that incessantly appear, suggesting you really ought to spend a dollar here and three bucks there for this essential bundle.
Oh it’s all so utterly gross, made more damning by being draped over such a flaccid knock-off of a years-old, beloved game, but with Sonic and pals cynically cut-and-pasted in. Which at least means it’s not worth worrying about, and if your kids are excited, just gently steer them over to the far superior source of…inspiration.
Fall Guys has always astonished me by just how not-predatory it is, when it could so easily be pressuring me to spend money for a far better time. Instead it just seems to want me to have some excellent fun, and I really value that. It’s really quite something to see Sega so grimly missing the point.
Turns out the boy’s got a good eye for calling these things.
