
The game is free, too, and it’s a tiny download. If you can play with other people who are just learning, the frustrations of your failures will be a lot more hilarious than if you were getting your ass handed to you online. It’s most fun to learn locally with some friends, so put up your own server (Linux only, for now). The controls are a little difficult to learn–give up on the keyboard keys and use the mouse wheel and right button–but on the whole the game is very approachable. It’s a remarkable implementation of a very solid concept. I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about Toribash. The engine allows for an impressive array of moves, as their promo video shows: There’s a huge amount of variety waiting in the wings, too–even something as simple as letting the player choose an opening stance would modify the gameplay significantly. You quickly learn a variety of opening styles, but even slight changes in your ragdoll’s forces will produce completely different results. I’m HookedĮvery match in Toribash is a little different. It’s much harder to turn a match over, though, but the ensuing brawls were rather entertaining for their brutality (and I’m talking Dan-in-the-thoroughfare quality brutality, sans eye gouging). We played some matches here with disqualification turned off, and it was an interesting dynamic. Most servers leave the default of enabling dismemberment, too, so a valid strategy is to literally tear off someone’s arm and throw it on the ground. Properly predicting and counteracting your opponent’s moves becomes a huge part of the strategy.Īll of the default servers have disqualification turned on, which means that a player loses if they touch the ground with anything except their hands or feet. The longer turn settings, 70 frames or so, have a very apparent rock-paper-scissors feel to them. The default server lineup offers a variety of game settings (the server sets the amount of time that passes each turn, and the total time per match). While playing by yourself can be fun for setting up ridiculous replays, the real fun starts when you play a match against someone else. You simply control two ragdolls simultaneously. It has a single-player mode, but there isn’t any AI to play against. Toribash is primarily a multiplayer game. They’re given enough time to create very complex maneuvers. Because everything is turn-based, though, there isn’t any real penalty to this for the player.
Toribash head template full#
It can take a full 20 seconds to set up your punch, kick, or grab just the way you want it. They didn’t attempt to solve the complexity problem. It’s a very hard problem to solve for a real-time game.Īnd that’s the brilliance of Toribash. As a designer, you either need to simplify the control mechanism, automate some aspect of the process, or rely on convoluted controls. The problem lies in the complication of movement. Other games have attempted to implement full body, physics-based control mechanisms.
