Cliff Notes – King Of Meat review – dystopian beef
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Gameplay Dynamics: King Of Meat combines co-op dungeon crawling with slapstick humour, offering over 100 themed levels but struggles to balance casual fun with deeper mechanics.
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Combat Complexity: The game features layered combat systems, including parrying and various weapon types, yet can feel overwhelming and detracts from the intended party game experience.
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Community Features: While level creation tools are robust and accessible, the absence of local multiplayer options and a rigid unlock system limit its appeal for both solo and group play.
King Of Meat review – dystopian beef
A different kind of dystopia (Amazon Games)
The Running Man, Fall Guys, and Adult Swim cartoons collide in this co-op dungeon crawler, where slapstick hijinks reign supreme.
Considering how popular Fall Guys became in the summer of 2020, it’s surprising how few imitators have riffed on its design and spirit since. There have been some knock-off clones, but aside from titles like Party Animals, few games have locked into the same comedic brand of online multiplayer on such a broad scale.
King Of Meat is different in many ways to Fall Guys, but energy wise, it’s a direct descendant. This isn’t a battle royale scrum where you survive in round-based waves but a co-op dungeon platformer for up to four players, where you hack, shove, bomb, shoot, and puzzle your way through level gauntlets for high scores and loot.
It’s a house built for slapstick silliness, but King Of Meat aspires for depth and staying power in its mechanics, progression, and creative tools. In action, for all its charms and robust gameplay tools, there’s almost too much going on to recommend it as a casual multiplayer diversion, and simultaneously too little of substance to fulfil its bigger ambitions.
The unwieldy focus is reflected in the presentation. If you’re wondering why it’s called King Of Meat, it’s the name of the in-universe dystopian game show where contestants compete for treasure and glory, even at the risk of becoming slabs of meat themselves.
It’s a riff on the concept in 1987’s The Running Man, albeit through a comedy lens reminiscent of Adult Swim’s output. It’s sometimes sharp and funny, mostly in the fully animated satirical commercials which wouldn’t feel out of place in Rick And Morty, but other times comes across as rather tryhard.
Unfortunately, King Of Meat drowns its funny moments with an overabundance of dialogue and characters which are often trying too hard to be *quirky*. Like Splatoon, different characters are tied to certain functions in a plaza you can roam around between runs – ranging from the usual shop for cosmetics, a place to upgrade weapons, or tonics you can buy for temporary buffs.
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
You can skip the dialogue, but the amount of times you’re returning to them, along with how much they interrupt proceedings in the early hours, it feels like toning down these eccentricities would have decluttered the noise and amplified the game’s funnier moments.
When you’re actually playing King Of Meat, it can be enjoyably hectic. Each of the many dungeons are based around a specific theme, whether switch-orientated puzzles, bouncing platforms, trap-laden nightmares, assault courses with swinging axes, and many others.
Beyond just beating each level, you’re also trying to accumulate the highest score possible to earn the gold trophy. You can do this in various ways, with scores tied to how much treasure you collect (with plenty of secret chests hidden in each level), your ability to stay alive, how stylishly you kill enemies to please the crowd, and the speed with which you blitz through it.
The levels largely use mechanics you’ve seen before, but they’re dense with secrets and consistently surprising. There’s no shortage of them either, with a huge stack of over 100 levels made by the developers, split between solo and multiplayer dungeons, along with those concocted by players using the game’s level creation suite.
The combat is a bit much (Amazon Games)
Time will tell if this aspect takes off, but the tools are easy to use once you’ve got a handle on the menu interface. It’s also flexible in terms of how much customisation you want to engage with, whether you just want to snap some preset rooms together, or get right down to the interior decoration of specific surfaces.
Similarly, for a game predominantly built around multiplayer hijinks, the combat is more layered than you’d expect. There are two attack buttons with your primary weapon for standard combos, along with charged-up attacks tied to holding down each, respectively.
In the hammer’s case, for example, you can swing it helicopter style to clear out surrounding enemies, or launch foes with a satisfying golf swing move. Other weapons, like the sword and shield or arcane knuckles, are more fast and furious, with quick jabs and punching projectiles you can shoot across the field.
So far, so simple. However, King Of Meat’s tougher enemies usually force you to engage in the game’s parry system – complete with a mild take on a Dark Souls-esque stagger meter. While we enjoy a parry as much as the next frame perfect sicko, in King Of Meat it feels very out of place and makes combat encounters more irritating than enjoyable on the higher difficulties, especially in a breezy party game where the fun derives from managing chaos over fighting prowess.
There are other mechanics to consider too. You have a secondary projectile weapon, starting with a crossbow and later a grenade launcher, to either chip away at enemies or activate traps. Glory moves are the title’s excellently silly showcases, where you can burp foes (and allies) to their doom, throw out helpful attack buff zones, or even summon a giant horse hoof stomp from the skies.
On top of this, you can equip attack or health-boosting tonics at the start of runs, and as you commit to a weapon, more combos open up when you hit specific kill count milestones.
There’s stuff to chew on, including a growing stack of weapons as you level up, but King Of Meat feels like it’s still working out what it wants to be. It’s caught between being an accessible party game with goofs aplenty, and possessing enough depth to encourage repeat dungeon runs for high scores and daily investment. At the moment, while fun in bursts, it doesn’t feel approachable or (ahem) meaty enough to satisfy either camp.
In some areas, King Of Meat simply falls short. If you don’t fancy partnering up with others online, there’s a significant amount of solo dungeons you can tackle. It’s an admirable inclusion, at a time when many multiplayer-orientated titles shun single-player experiences, but the levels are nowhere near as enjoyable without others to bonk skeletons, blow open secret walls, or carefully hop between platforms with. Criminally, there’s no local co-op option either, which would have made the whole proposition more enticing in general.
This isn’t a live service game in the traditional sense (it’s a paid title at £24.99), with very little in the way of microtransactions at the outset, but it’s weirdly beholden to the systemic framework of those kinds of games. The main unlockables are tied to a battle pass-like track, which not only looks cheap and generic, but level-gates the roster of weapons you want to mess around with.
It’s understandable to an extent, to incentivise repeat runs in dungeons, but we wish it was less rigid in a way where you could select your starting weapon or choose what you unlock in a shop – so that it’s more like Splatoon, which has this flexibility and is all the better for it.
There’s plenty to like about King Of Meat, but beneath its slapstick and irreverent appeal, there’s a clumsy mix of ideas rubbing up against one another. A community led approach through its creation tools might refine what could be a diamond in the rough, but as of right now, this game show has landed with an awkward first season.
King Of Meat review summary
In Short: A multiplayer driven dungeon crawler with flashes of comical Entertainment, but which neither excels as a party game or as a captivating solo grind.
Pros: Some great level design, with plenty of personality. The animated satirical commercials are top notch. Lots of customisation and plenty of levels to sink your teeth into. Level creation tools are both accessible and comprehensive.
Cons: No local multiplayer options. Combat lacks impact, is overstuffed and, in dungeons of a higher difficulty, is just plain irritating. The characters and dialogue can be overbearing and obnoxious.
Score: 6/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Amazon Games
Developer: Glowmade
Release Date: 7th October 2025
Age Rating: 16
The level creation is one of the best parts (Amazon Games)
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