PC Review code provided by META Publishing
Publisher META Publishing and developer Chicken Studios were determined to bring a new hilarious take on party games. What's funnier than rubber chickens with even more rubbery physics? Probably just you and your friends yelling at each other. They attempted to bring this together in Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown. Let's see how well they accomplished their goals.
Gameplay
The game is a party-style multiplayer battle royale for up to four players online or couch play. Get some friends together and get ready to cluck each other up. You pick a win count and you will be put onto different battle maps with different objectives like using a plunger crossbow to stick your opponents to the wall until you bring their health to zero. It’s a very silly battle game but it creates some funny moments.
There are bombs that you get to throw to deal damage to your opponents and most of the maps are destructible as well. So while you’re trying to take your friends down you are also breaking the environment around you making it a different battlefield as you go. There are different types of bombs and items that you can pick up like ice bombs or banana peels. One of my favorite game modes is one where bombs are disabled and you pick up these extendo-arm grabbers and you just try to grab each other and pull each other into spikes or even all the way off the map. There are giant mechs that can spawn that really wreak havoc on the map and lay some major damage to your opponents.
If you ever feel like you’ve run out of maps to play, which I highly doubt you’ll get tired of the maps that are built into the game, there is a map creator mode. If you have a creative or devious mind you can put together your own map with traps, moving objects, or just a plain even battlefield with lots of decorations to destroy. The map creator is pretty simple but the controls can get a little confusing especially if you’re using a keyboard. If I accidentally placed a block I couldn’t figure out how to pick it back up and move it I had to delete it and replace it, but other than that it was a simple process.
Audio and Visual
Screaming Chicken has cartoon-like graphics that only add to the hilarity of the game. From chickens being tossed across the map from an explosion to chickens desperately trying to fly with their odd body shapes everything in the game has a bit of humor to it. The sounds in the game are perfectly timed and humorous during the game all you hear in between the gunfire and explosions is the sound of rubber chickens screaming but it's not overwhelming and annoying and it truly is really funny.
Replayability
It’s a party game, you can play this game any time and any day. There is no story mode or challenges or anything so you shouldn’t expect to be sitting down by yourself playing it for hours unless you enjoy creating maps for the community then by all means spend your time playing it. There is no shortage of content for this game so you will really never run out of gameplay so the replayability is really infinite.
What It Could Have Done Better
I don't have much to complain about so I'll keep this short and sweet. I think they should have had a tutorial for the map creator so that you might have a bit of a clue on how to put a map together but even then not everybody even wants to create maps. I also wish there was a way to add bots to the game, so you could either play solo with three other bots or if you wanted to play 2v2 with your friend you could play 2v2 with the bots on your team or play against two bots. No matter how long I waited I couldn't find players online so that was a bit of a bummer so bots would help with that.
Verdict
Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown is a super fun and unique party game! It is a battle royale style party game which hasn’t been done very many other times but they always end up being fun and this is no different. If you have friends that are down to yell at each other this game is perfect for you. For the game being only $14.99 I think it’s a really good game to pick up for a group of friends. You could buy a copy for all four friends for the price of one triple-A game that you’ll only play a couple of times.
Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown is available now on PC via Steam. Are you ready to cluck around?
