Hands On: King Of Meat - Fun And Foolish Hack-And-Slash With A Side Of Mario Maker

It's safe to say that King of Meat has sprung out of nowhere. Developed by Guildford-based studio Glowmade and published by Amazon Games, it was one of the genuinely new announcements in Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase, and you may be wondering what exactly it has in store.

We were in the same boat when we were invited by the publisher to a preview event earlier this month. But, after watching the trailer, hearing from the developer, and getting to go hands-on for roughly two hours, we're starting to build up a pretty good picture of what it's all about.

King of Meat is goofy hack-and-slash fun that combines the co-op chaos of Fall Guys with the creative control of Mario Maker. It all felt very familiar and it's an experience that will live or die by its community (and only time will tell how that one plays out), but from what we've seen so far, there are plenty of silly laughs to be had.

Our preview began with a brief rundown of King of Meat's world, Loregok, an introduction to its famous faces, and a whistle-stop description of what the heck's going on. If you looked at the reveal trailer and thought, 'Surely there won't be any lore here,' you'd be wrong.

Loregok has all of the touchstones you would expect from a fantasy ecosystem. There are dragons, there are reanimated skeletons, there are freaky trolls. There's also corporate commercialism — an addition we weren't expecting, but one that forms the backbone of King of Meat's setup.

In Loregok, fearsome warriors head to the Komstruct Koliseum to earn fame, glory, and riches by participating in the popular gameshow 'King of Meat'. On paper, it's a Gladiators-style test of strength where teams of four contenders (READY!) have to make their way through a dungeon in one piece, defeating the enemies and collecting the treasure therein. But success isn't only defined by survival, it's also based on entertainment value. You'll have to keep King of Meat's viewers entertained by completing its challenges in the most stylish way possible.

How you do this is up to you. Collecting treasure will tickle the fans, but doing so with flashy outfits, OTT 'Glory Moves', and wacky weapons is the way to really fire them up. Here lies King of Meat's heart: fun.

In our two hours of playtime, we got to experience a decent range of Glowmade-developed dungeons (we'll explain the other type of dungeon in a moment), all of which were entertaining enough with their simple puzzles and easily grasped hack-and-slash combat. But the challenges quickly started to blur together. What helped to separate them was the wacky upgrades we acquired between each round.

Walking around the inter-dungeon hub area, the 'Iron Law Plaza,' we picked up new weapons (of which we were only able to see the sword and hammer, but inferred there were more hidden in the game's full build) and abilities that directly impacted how we approached the next challenge. We also picked up stupid cosmetics which didn't do much to change our skills, but did let us tackle everything in a pair of pink heels with a rubber duck balanced on our head.

Naturally, this is designed with the multiplayer experience in mind. You can tackle KoM's challenges as a team either in four-player online co-op or via online matchmaking with cross-play and cross-progression enabled at launch. That said, there is also a route for those who want to go it alone and you'll be able to take on the dungeons as a solo contender, too.

There's an upgrade system that provided our team with extra cosmetics and combat abilities along the way, but the more we became acquainted with the 'attack, dodge roll, attack, jump' approach of every combat encounter (don't worry, that's where the Soulslike comparisons end), the more we found that embracing the cosmetic weirdness is the way to play.

We mentioned that things became somewhat repetitive for us in the fun, but rather simple, dungeons, though that's only part of KoM's appeal. While we weren't able to sample it in the preview build we were presented with, this game is as much about designing the dungeons as it is about playing them.

In our welcome video, we were introduced to some of the creative options available, from building a challenge with pre-sets to designing everything from scratch in 'Freeform Mode'. You pick the dungeon layout, traps, enemies, and treasure locations, and assemble it all in-game before sharing it with the world. Much like Mario Maker, your creations can only be made available to the public if you can complete them yourself, but the freedom to design, build, and play made us hopeful that KoM might present some promising challenges in the years ahead — depending on the community's skill.

Glowmade told us that it will continue to provide its own levels too, but we saw a decent amount of promise in the concept of creation, assuming it's easy enough to grasp. This is a first-time studio, though its developers are no strangers to this idea of community, with some having previously worked on LittleBigPlanet — a game that shares a lot of the same wacky DNA we saw here. Others at Glowmade have credits including Fable, Battlefield, and Horizon Zero Dawn on their resume which, while not quite as similar to KoM, isn't a pedigree to be scoffed at.

We should mention that our preview took place with the Steam version of the game and, while it looked very smooth to us, we would expect to see a substantial visual downgrade on the Switch. Things can also get rather busy, with enemies spawning from multiple locations at once while un-redeemed treasure falls from the sky and bounces on the floor.

We Switch fans are used to features like this sounding the death knell for our hybrid port and even the Steam build struggled to keep up at points, with some of us needing an occasional reboot after characters got stuck in select environments or became unresponsive. That said, this was a preview build, so we can't make any guarantees until we've seen the final product.

All in all, we had fun with King of Meat. It's nothing we haven't seen before and some of the challenges we faced in our hands-on playtime started to become a little repetitive, but the promise of community-created dungeons poses the possibility of even wackier builds ahead. If the Switch hardware can keep up with everything going on, and if the create mode is as simple as we were led to believe, then there's no reason to see this as anything other than harmless good fun.