Video Gamers Podcast - Deep Dive Double Header: Operation Tango and Knockout City - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

Gaming hosts Paul and Josh are bringing the heat in this extra special gaming double header deep dive! First up we test out or hacker and spy chops in Operation Tango and give you our thoughts on this little known game, then we jump back to our highschool gaming glory days and smash people in the face with dodgeballs in our review of Knockout City. A double header like this only comes once in a lifetime... Ok, maybe every few months for us, but that sounds less dramatic.  Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, Josh here. I just wanted to take a second and let you know about this amazing new product called MultiplayerSquad.com. It's the greatest new addition to gaming. Well, I mean practically life. It's sure to fill you with glee, help you make new friends, and expose you to all sorts of awesome memes. It's got the best community of gamers around, and more than that, it's the best way to help support the show and let us keep providing awesome content. What? I gotta read this disclaimer for legal reasons. Warning. MultiplayerSquad.com can cause feelings of joy, happiness, companionship, ownage, and all-around sense of being awesome.

If you notice yourself acting more like Josh, please discontinue use immediately and seek professional help. Hey, who put that in there? Paul! Hey, everyone. You are listening to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are a couple of dads who are lifelong gamers. We love to spend our free time playing games and talking about games.

So for all of you out there listening, come join the squad mate circle. Join us here for the next hour or so while we have a family-friendly conversation about games. So for all of you out there listening, come join the squad mate circle. Join us here for the next hour or so while we have a family friendly conversation about gaming. Every other Monday, we have a deep dive episode where we usually break down a singular game in detail, where we talk about the gameplay, we give our personal thoughts, we read some community reviews, and we decide where it ranks on our overall leaderboard. But today things are going to be a little bit different, and we have a special treat for everyone. But first we need some introductions. I am your host, Paul, and with me he is decrypting passcodes, he's adding up how many pins are in the connector and he's reading through the wire cutting protocol it's josh i am a hacker extraordinaire paul we gotta hear you uh

clacking away at the keyboard josh you gotta hear that i'm the sign of a good hacker it'll stop the uh yeah there we go i'm through the firewall all right there you go exactly now i'm i'm approaching the server the faster you type the There you go, exactly. Now I'm approaching the server. The faster you type, the better your hacking is. Yeah, exactly. That's just, it's science. All right. So, you know, sometimes, Josh,

we pick a game to cover for a deep dive episode and we don't realize how short it is. And all of a sudden you have to semi-scramble and say, we better pick a second game to add on here. So we're coming at you guys with a two-for-one. We are going to be covering Operation Tango and also Knockout City. So this will be a two-for-one.

You know, it's good for the listeners that our unpreparedness and what games we're actually covering pays off for them because you're right. This was going to be a single game, a deep dive episode. And then through no fault of our own, we beat a game very quickly and we went, we don't think that's going to make for an hour long show.

And the people would riot if we did not give them an hour episode. So we did, we turned it into a two-for-one. I'm excited, though, man. It's been a while since we've done one of these. Yeah, we've done a couple two-for-ones, but yeah, it has been a while. So before we dive in, let's insert the obligatory. Make sure to subscribe, rate us five stars,

leave a review, and also please consider supporting the podcast. You can go to MultiplayerSquad.com. You can become a Patreon supporter where you get some great perks, like getting a shout-out on the show. And also, that will help keep the podcast running, and we would be very grateful. So again, you can do that at MultiplayerSquad.com. Do you want to feed a starving podcast host? Yes.

For the price of a cup of coffee a month. You can feed Josh. Exactly. All right. Well, I think it's time, Josh. Let's do this. All right. So first up, we are going to be talking about Operation Tango. And this one came on to our radar because of a user on our Discord server. So this one was brought to us by T-Foles, and he had messaged us and just said, hey, there's this new game that released today called Operation Tango. Have you guys heard about it? And neither of us had. I think we looked at it for about seven seconds and then bought it because it looked like our kind of game. It was right up our alley right away. So great suggestion, number one.

Thanks for that. And then everybody else that's listening can thank T-Foles as well, because I'm not sure we would have discovered this game otherwise. Yeah, we might not have, because this is not anything I had heard of. And so if you want to come join our Discord, it's completely free. There's a link in the episode description. And, you know, that's exactly how we get suggestions from the community. So I have the description here from Steam. And here's what they have to say about Operation Tango. It takes two to save the world in this cooperative spy adventure. Pair up with a friend as agent or hacker with only your voices to connect you

and work together to bring a high-tech global menace to its knees. All right, so Josh, in plain man's terms, how would you describe Operation Tango? Because I'm guessing most of our listeners have not even heard of this game. Yeah, I mean, like I said, we hadn't. So this game is a cooperative spy game, I guess. Honestly, the easiest reference for this would be keep talking and nobody explodes.

But I'm not sure how many people know what that game is either. So in this game, it's basically like a puzzle solving game where you each see something different. And the only way that you're going to get through these challenges or puzzles is by telling the person that you're playing with what you are seeing, and then they have the ability to give you the answer or, you know, what you need to proceed. And then at the same time, you're doing the same to them. So it relies very heavily on communication and having a good friend that you can play with. Yeah, you have to have a good friend. That appreciates the chaos and the mistakes that might get made and stuff like that. Legitimately,

I love this type of game, man. We played the heck out of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes for a while because I really like that let's all put our heads together, let's all work together to try and beat this, whether it's because it's a short timer or it's super difficult or you have to kind of think outside the box and figure something out. Or maybe it's just, I have to explain something to you that you have no idea what I'm trying to explain. Right. And we're on like a 30-second timer. So it's like, just like the dumbest, like, like silliest things will come out of your mouth sometimes. But that's basically what this game is

in a nutshell. And what they did over keep talking and nobody explodes is they made it much more like graphically pleasing and uh you know you're both you're each seeing something different on your end and i think that's a pretty neat uh like twist that they put on it yeah so like for keep talking and nobody explodes it only focuses on trying to defuse the one bomb and so this game is very different because you can have one person be the hacker and that's more akin to being the person using the bomb manual in Keep Talking.

So that's a person who basically has access to the computer systems. Sometimes you have to crack codes. Sometimes you have to see where security cameras are or whatever it might be. And you're basically guiding the other person who is the agent. And they're actually moving around in physical space, trying to accomplish something in the world. So together, it's like you're solving the puzzles and it relies completely on communication.

And one of the things that I found really funny in this game is that sometimes we would all of a sudden be at a certain part of the game and you you were kind of hinting at it you don't even know what to describe and there were times when we were playing certain puzzles where all of a sudden I realized oh you're running around in 3d space but the thing I'm looking at is a flattened 2D image. And eventually, you kind of figure that stuff out through the communication, the things click into place, and then you know what to do. And it's rather clever in a lot of ways. It really is. And when we say you don't have any idea what the other person you are playing with is seeing, we mean that. It's like you said, the spy is in a 3D space, maybe walking through a hotel or through a building or an office complex or something, but you have no idea. You don't know what I'm seeing.

It's not like you have a camera and you get to see through my eyes or something like that. Legitimately, I have to start off by going, okay, Paul, I'm outside a hotel. There's doors here. It's three stories. That kind of stuff. So I think that that is part of the draw to it is that trying to explain everything to somebody is interesting. And it leads to some very funny moments, which I really like. It definitely helps. And it's funny because you get better as you play this game with a friend. You start to learn how to communicate. And we saw that with Keep Talking

and Nobody Explodes, too, is that after a few rounds of that, man, people are talking in shorthand almost at that point. But that's part of the fun of it, is seeing that progression as well. Yeah. So I thought that it would maybe be helpful to provide a little bit of context of how the game's divided. Basically, the entire game, you are chasing after this known hacker slash terrorist named Cypher, and it's divided into six missions. And the missions themselves, if you know what you're doing, you can beat them in a couple minutes. The first go-round, since it's new and you don't really know, I'd say most of them are about 15 to 25 minutes the first time you run through them. So this is not a long game by any means.

You can go from beginning to end in a couple hours. It is relatively short. We'll talk a little bit about replayability here in a little bit, but I thought that it would help if we just kind of talked a little bit about the opening mission, which is actually a heist mission. And so the very first time that we played, Josh, I was the hacker and you were in the field as the agent. And is there anything that you remember or anything that sticks out in the first mission in the game? I thought it was cool that as the agent, I got the ability to move

around. And I mean, you kind of expect that, right? Like with the name hacker and agent or is it agent or spy? I can't remember. Yeah, agent. Is it agent? Okay. So it's like, you know, that kind of tells you the role that you're going to play. And so I did assume that I would be James Bond, you know, infiltrating and you would be my Q. Is it Q? Yeah. Q is the guy with all the gear. Sure. Yeah.

Q, M, one of those. M? One of those letters. Yeah. But that you would be kind of guiding me and helping me move through whatever I needed to do. And that's really,'s really true to form. Now, there's a couple levels that mix that up just a little bit. So it is kind of neat that the hacker's not just relegated to sitting there doing nothing or minor electronic type stuff. But I was pretty impressed with the first level because it's a hotel. It's fairly big. You do have

some freedom of movement. It is not open world by any means. I mean, these are fairly small levels, but I did think that it was pretty cool for me to walk around, say, hey, look, I'm in a lobby. I need to go over here. There's a camera over there and that kind of stuff. So I did think that that was really neat. And the game really just kind of throws you right into it. I mean, I think it's only a few seconds in before you know that, okay, it's time to do agent and hackery type things now. Yeah, it happens pretty fast. But they also add a little bit of flair in the game, which is kind of neat. So in the very beginning, you were in an elevator, and you can't move. And it was my job as the hacker to hack the system,

and then control the elevator by sending you up to the top floor. But then it also let me adjust the augmented reality aspect of the elevator. So I saw all these options under a folder for AR overlays, and I clicked on Christmas. And all of a sudden for you, you're surrounded by like holographic snow and there was a snowman and stuff like that. So the game also throws in just little things like that that are kind of fun where you and the other person get to interact. Yeah, which is great because it's I mean, you know, obviously you're trying to complete this mission and some of its puzzle solving some of its I want to like I call it like a challenge because it's not necessarily like hard to decipher. But it is neat that they do have these kind of one-off things. And I feel like they have that throughout the game. The game does do a pretty good job of mixing up like the missions and the gameplay and stuff like that too, which is kind of nice to see. Yeah. So in that first

heist mission, it really does serve as kind of a tutorial. They kind of get you acclimated with the different mechanics, the different types of challenge slash puzzles that you're going to face. And one of the very first things that you run into is what they call the joint decryptor. And this is like a little puzzle minigame to hack into the system. And basically it shows you on your screen, it's almost like a labyrinth game. There's a little marble on the bottom left, and then you see kind of like a golf hole on the top right, and clearly you need to move it over there. But there's a little bit of a twist for how you get it in there. Right, Josh?

You know, it's like this game, it looks so easy at first. And I think the very first one, there's no obstacles or anything, but one person gets to control the up and down movement of the ball and the other person gets to control the left and right movement of the ball. And man, I know you're listening. I know what you're thinking. You're like, oh, that sounds so easy. Let me tell you, in the beginning, it ain't easy, man. Because I think I was right and left and you were up and down. And it was like, okay, well, we figured that one out. But if you touch the walls or you touch any obstacle, the ball gets zapped and you have to start over. And the game very quickly starts adding obstacles that you have to make your way around. And that's when I realized like, oh man, we are not in sync on this. Like I was moving to the right, you're moving up,

but then I think you thought I was going too fast. So you'd start moving down, but then I'd see it moving down. So I'd go left and then you'd move it back up. And this thing was all over the place. It was pretty hilarious. I know we were picking on each other because I was like, Paul, quit moving it up. And you're like, Josh, you have to move it to the right. You got to go right and then I'll go up. And it was just funny to kind of sit there and blame it on the other person for a little while. Well, and it's not just the obstacles that they start throwing at you. Then they start throwing, it's almost like a wind mechanic. So all of a sudden you have these purple arrows pointing diagonally. So now it's

like your ball is going to shoot into the wall unless both of us are like tapping the right direction at the right speed, which is a lot harder than it sounds, especially when you're just verbally communicating. So these are like some of the types of puzzles that you're doing. Sometimes it would be a little bit different where like as the agent, you were trying to break into the vault and I could see on my screen that there were hidden triggers under the floor and I'd have to verbally tell you, okay, keep walking forward, go, go, stop. Now turn to your left. Okay, go forward, forward, stop, look down, and then you could activate the trigger. And so a lot of times you're trying to give directions. Sometimes you didn't even know what you would need to do.

You're just in an empty room, and I have to figure out on my side what I have to guide you through. And then even in that room, once we activated the triggers, do you remember what happened next after that, Josh? Was that the lasers? The laser beams started coming down? The lasers. Like 700 laser beams.

Oh, we died so many times. Yeah, that next one was, because this isn't spoilery, because it's the very first level, but like red laser beams, spy lasers, you know, your typical lasers that are going to catch any agent trying to break in somewhere.

They start shooting down from the ceiling. You have to make your way to these terminals while these lasers are rotating around the room. I have to access this terminal and then call out a color and a frequency to you. And then you have to very quickly dial that in. And I have to get out before that round of lasers comes around. So that part was fairly intense because it had to happen very quickly but like one of the things this game doesn't tell you is all of the little nuance and you kept putting this stuff in and i kept dying and it wasn't activating the terminals well we figured out after i don't know four or five times of dying and resetting that you had to actually like put

the dial like turn the dial and then like hold it down or something like that yeah which it doesn't tell you so we couldn't quite figure out why it wasn't working at first it didn't take very long but that was one of those instances where this game does not hold your hand at all no but they do ramp up the difficulty and kind of teach you the mechanics so it's not unnecessarily difficult or anything like that but you do have to figure some of this stuff out from trial and error like this is a game that you're you're gonna die a few times but the game never puts you back terribly far that it feels frustrating it always just puts you back at the beginning of that challenge and it

is not a brain bending game like i think i called it like you know some like a puzzle game in the beginning like earlier in the show and it's like i don't mean to imply that this not a brain-bending game. I think I called it some puzzle game in the beginning, earlier in the show. I don't mean to imply that this is a brain-bender by any means, because these puzzles are not head-scratching. You're completely stuck and have no idea what to do. It does require good communication, and you are going to fail sometimes. But it's not like this is a super tough brain exercise type game either yeah yeah that's that's definitely the case one other thing that's kind of neat about the game is that it's 20 but the second person gets to play for free with the friend pass that was a really

good thing that they did there honestly like you know we hinted towards the length of this game it is not a long game at all um but the fact that two people get to play this game for a total of 20 bucks is great right because the game's relatively short so if this was like a 40 or 60 game that'd probably be a little bit crazy but here in this case you know you get to knock it out i did want to talk a little bit about replayability because keep talking and nobody explodes is a little bit different, right? Like the bomb will have a certain number of puzzles and then that gets randomized. So every time you look at the bomb, you're familiar with the mechanics, but it's different every single time.

This game is completely scripted from beginning to end it's not procedurally generated you know you're you know exactly the mission and so once you do the mission once and know the mechanics it is pretty easy to beat it again so i was curious as to what you thought about replayability i mean we tried you know like i don't think it really has a whole lot they do tout it as having some replayability like if you read read what the developer says about it. But we were having a lot of fun with this game. We didn't want it to end. And when it did end, we both kind of went like,

oh man, wow, that was really fast. So then we did decide to play some of the missions as the other person. So if I played the agent the first time, I was like, hey, let me be the hacker this time. And I feel like we went through two or maybe three. I think it was just two of the missions that were some of the cooler ones where I was like, man, I want to see what you saw. So let's play that one. But we kind of knew what to expect. I remember what I was struggling with. So I kind of knew how to explain it to you the second time around. There's really not. There's really not. Maybe you might get an extra 30 minutes to maybe

an hour out of it replayability wise. But then at that point, I think you're done. I think you just you play this for the experience for the first time. And then honestly, I don't think you stick with it after that. Yeah. I think one of the missions that stuck out in particular for me was when i was playing as the agent and you were the hacker and i don't i have no idea what you're looking at but on my screen i just see it almost looks like a racetrack but on my screen everything's just going from left to right i can can see you. So when you move, I can see. But I'm looking at you like top down, bird's eye view. And I see obstacles coming up ahead.

And so I would tell you, oh, yeah, go to the middle, move to the right. And then all of a sudden, I would see these things coming up behind you. And then I would warn you, oh, there's the guy behind you. Get into the middle lane. And I had no idea what you were looking at. And then when we beat the game, I think that was the first mission we went back to. And I was like, oh, this looks like I'm running in Sonic, like in the 3D Sonic games where, you know, you're grabbing coins as you're running and you got to evade the, you know, the obstacles. And so it is kind of fun and neat when you get to see it from the other

perspective. So yeah, some of the missions you'll go back and swap between agent and hacker. But this is definitely not a game you're going to get 20 hours out of. It's a couple hours at most. I checked our playtime. And I mean, we were not just sitting around. We did play a couple of the missions as the other person, and I had 3.5 hours. So our total play time in this is three and a half hours, which is... I mean, that gives you a pretty good idea of the amount of time that you're going to get out of this game. But I mean, if you look at it for $20, if you split that between two people, that's $10 a piece. So if you each get almost four hours worth of entertainment for $20, if you split that between two people, that's $10 a piece. So if you each get almost four hours worth of entertainment for $10, it starts to sound a little bit better at that point.

Yeah, you just have to have the right perspective and kind of know what you're signing up for. Were there any other missions or any other mechanics or anything that stuck out before we kind of jump into our regular segments? I think that this game excelled when there was a time crunch. I remember the train mission. I had a lot of fun on the train mission because you have to do a lot of back and forth very quickly, like explaining things. Yes. And then I thought that was very reminiscent of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. But then at the same time, where I thought it had a neat little twist to it, was you were explaining things back to me. So we were both under that crunch of trying to explain what we're seeing. You're feeding me info, I'm feeding you info. And the whole time,

there's just this clock ticking down. And that was where I thought the game really excelled and took off. I wish the whole game had kind of followed that theme of putting the pressure on a little bit yeah because that to me got my like my heart pumping a little bit like i was like yeah let's go let's like let's do this yeah because most of the game you're kind of free to leisure yeah and complete the puzzles or the challenges at your own pace so yeah the ones that had a time crunch were definitely a little more interesting there are actually literal bombs that you have to diffuse like keep talking and those parts are fun or the challenges at your own pace. So yeah, the ones that had a time crunch were definitely a little more interesting. There are actually literal bombs that you have to defuse, like keep talking.

And those parts are fun too because there's a time crunch. I think the last thing that I would say about the game is that when you finish the last mission, it says case cipher closed. And then it shows a little bit of a cut scene and both of our characters got another phone call and so clearly they're setting it up for potential future dlc or future

titles this is the kind of game i would absolutely throw a couple of bucks at if there was a new case and it was going to be 4.99 or something i'd be more than happy to unlock more content so i think as long as the game is successful, we'll probably get more out of it. Yeah, I would give me DLC on this one because I loved what we played. I just wanted to play more of it. Yeah, or let us do mods. I would love to see what the community would come up with. If they open it up to the community, that would be great too. Yeah, that's something where maybe you could actually charge you know 40 or 50 bucks and it would be worth it yeah all right well josh you know that's uh those are our thoughts about operation tango what does the community think

about this game all right so this game has not been out long, but I did pull some reviews. So the first one is a not recommended. This guy, I always like to say that the amount of play time that people have on this, because I think it's a little telling. This guy has one hour on record, which is a third of the game if you think about it. But he said, if you play as the agent, this product is literally a walking simulator while you wait for the hacker to play the rest of the game if you think about it but he said if you play as the agent this product is literally a walking simulator while you wait for the hacker to play the rest of the game now i i don't agree with that guy no i don't agree with that either no like you and i went back and forth like if i

was the agent one round i was the hacker the next round like we we literally rotated after every mission and there was not once where i was disappointed to be the agent or the hacker. No, like I thought it's perfectly balanced fun level wise. Oh, absolutely. Neither is better than the other. They're just different.

Yeah. So I don't know where this guy's coming from. I thought it was funny. I kind of wanted to pick on him for giving it a negative review because of that, especially after one hour. So I'm not really sure like, where did you get that idea?

Yeah. Um, so, uh, where did you get that idea? Yeah. Um, so, uh, next one is recommended. This guy has 3.2 hours on record, so probably beat the game. And they say really great game.

Love these types of games. Like it takes two and the, we were here series. And it's a great addition to the genre. Thoroughly enjoyed damaging a friendship. Now, have you played We Were Here? I have not. And so that made me curious, because it's like, now I kind of want to check this out.

I've played it with one of my sons. And it's very hard to play this game with someone who's a lot younger when it all relies on communication. It does get a little bit frustrating. But We Were Here is definitely made in the same vein. So you have two people running around in different areas and you can access valves or a map and you kind of have to communicate and talk each other through it. I think it's actually a free game, which is kind of neat, but that one is very similar. That's funny. Yeah, I'll have to look into that one. Maybe I can play it with my kids and yell at them or something. Yeah, that's kind of what it became on our side.

This person says, not recommended. Three and a half hours on record. Conveniently, just long enough where I can't get a refund after playing the game. It's way too short. They could have done much better. After three and a half hours of having a blast, they had the gall to end it. They could have done much better, but then they're going to charge you more money for it, too. It's that kind of, where do you draw the line between how much money you spent versus how much entertainment you got out of it?

Exactly. I'll say this, the majority of the negative reviews were because people thought the game was too short. Now, if you think the game's too short, then that probably tells you that you were actually enjoying the game and you just wanted it to be longer. Exactly. Like, in essence, your negative review is really a positive review because you're like, hey, I wanted more of that. And honestly, if the game was twice as long, people would say, oh, these mechanics keep repeating, and why do I have to keep doing the same thing? I'm not putting any stock into that comment. I think the length is fine.

Yep, okay, so I know we've got a whole other game to cover, so I won't keep reading reviews here, but we do have to make our guesses as to what we think the overall user rating for this game is on a scale of zero to 100. Paul, what do you think? OK, so. I think almost everyone who plays this game is going to like it. You're going to have some complaints about length.

I think on the whole, it's still going to be really high. I'm going to say 91%. All right. I said 86% was my guess. The actual rating is 89%. Whoa. So, yeah. We were both really close.

It's up there, man. I agree with that, to be honest. I think this game is a lot of fun. But you won this round, paul so you get to introduce this next segment i won by one percent all right let's hit that music hey baby do you like star wars because yoda only one for me what do you think about that one terrible it was all right so this segment is called make love marry or murder and this is where we rate the game on how we feel the game is so josh i'm

curious to hear what you're gonna say because I know neither of us is going to murder it. And just by nature, the game is so short. What do you do with this game? Where do you put it? Is this a Vegas marriage, Paul? This is like a marriage that gets annulled. It doesn't last long enough. I kind of hinted, for me personally, I love the game. I had an absolute blast playing this game. There was not one part of the game that I didn't like, except that the game ended way too soon.

I'm that person that goes like, oh, come on, man, give me more. Yeah. But I'm not going to gripe about it. I'm not going to give it a negative review because of that. Because this was so much fun. I would easily pay another 20 bucks to have another four-hour play session with new content, right? So for me, I mean, it's hard to say I'm going to marry a game that's only three and a half hours long. So I would, I think, say that because I think the game was a blast.

But I'm going to have to say, hey, it's a make love just for the simple fact that it's only three and a half hours long, man. This is the shortest game that we've covered, right? Like this one, you knock out so quick. Yeah, it's almost like a marriage, except you're getting married when you're on death's door. You're getting married at 88 years old, and it's just not going to last long. So that's almost like what it is. I feel like it's a make love, or I'm sorry, I feel like it's a marry game. That's how much I like it and recommend it.

But yeah, I guess technicality, it's really a make love in that context. And I feel bad for that like technically it should be a mary because i i honestly i'm having a hard time thinking of something that i didn't like about this game yeah i'm 100 with you you know i just it was so much fun it's just like operation tango i knew you so well and then you just left in the middle of the night and you never came back. But left you wanting more. Yes. There's something to that.

There's something to that. That's not a bad thing. So, all right. Well, let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up. All right, Josh. We just recently updated our leaderboard. So our leaderboard is currently perfect. We can't mess this up, Paul. We're about to mess it up because I feel like wherever we put this, inevitably, it's going to change.

I don't know if it's going to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast, we always, at the end of our deep dives, we rate our games on an overall leaderboard, which you can find at multiplayerpodcast.com. And it's kind of like a list of what games we recommend. So we do take into consideration the cost, the playtime, how much fun it is, whether or not it's a must play. It's highly subjective. So looking at our leaderboard, Josh, kind of what are you thinking? What kind of range would you put this in? I mean, I think we have to compare this game to Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Which we have at 21 out of 43. So almost dead middle. Right. And so, I mean,

I would use Keep Talking as the baseline and say, would you rather play Operation Tango or would you rather play Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes? And I get that one is more of a party game and the other is like just two people game. So there's that dynamic there. Man, it's just so tough, dude. Stupid game being so short messes up everything. I know, right? Because I feel like the highs of Operation Tango are way higher than Keep Talking. But Keep Talking has not infinite longevity,

but you can easily play 20, 30 hours, and it's still a blast. And if you and I played Keep Talking today, we would have a lot of fun with it. Yeah, we would. You know, it's one of those things where I think we have to put it... Oh, man. I was gonna say, I think we have to put it under.

But then Operation Tango, like you said, it kind of has the higher highs while you're playing through it. I feel like if you could only play one, I think would say operation tango yeah i feel like i feel like they took the mechanics that keep talking put in and then they improved upon it so i feel like it's still in the same range i would put it maybe a couple above keep talking but i think we got to put it somewhere in that 15 to 20 range, which is where we've got Deep Rock Galactic, Among Us, No Man's Sky, Far Cry 5, Raft, Vermintide 2, and then Keep Talking. I think it's somewhere in that range. I agree with you.

My gut is telling me to put it just under Raft, because as a two-person game, I think Raft excels a little bit. But then Operation Tango is that bright flame in the night, Paul, where it just burns fast and bright, and then it's just out, too. Whereas Raft is a much longer game. So I agree with you 100%. I don't think I'd put it above No Man's Sky. No, I would not. Somewhere in that Raft range. I think I'd lean raft range. Like, either one... I think I'd lean towards one under raft.

I was going to say one under raft or one under Vermintide 2. Oh, man. Either way, I'm good. Vermintide 2 is so good, man. Let's put it one under Vermintide 2. All right, so it's literally... That way we're consciously saying, hey, we think this game is slightly better than Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

But I don't want to rate it too high, and then it's like nothing else ever comes to this game. They don't ever release DLC or anything either. Exactly. So how funny. It ended up literally right next to Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. I think that's fair. I think we both highly recommend Operation Tango. Well worth the $20, especially if you split it with a buddy and go in for $10 each.

Great, great value. Just know what you're getting. It's going to be short. Yeah, wise words. All right, well, before we jump into Knockout City, let's take a small break and hear from one of our sponsors. This episode of the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast is brought to you by the Blizzard Gear Store by Fanatics. If you're a long-term listener of the show, you know how much we love Blizzard games here. We even have Overwatch as our number one game on our leaderboard. And I've got great news for you guys out there. You can actually help support our show by purchasing Blizzard gear through

multiplayerpodcast.com forward slash blizzard store. There is clothing for men, women, and children. There's collectibles, toys, so much stuff to browse through and look at. I was taking a look and saw you can order a replica of Genji's sword that you can hang on your wall. There's Lego sets, D.Va onesies. What more could you guys want? So please check it out at multiplayerpodcast.com forward slash blizzard store. Now back to the show.

Alright Josh, we are now back and it is time for game two out of two. We're talking about Knockout City. This is one that I had seen an article or two about it, but I had not really paid very much attention. And similarly to Operation Tango, this was also suggested on Discord. So this one came in from Jake Crist, where he recommended checking it out. And Knockout City, I do have the description here from Steam, team up and duke it out with rival crews in Knockout City, where epic dodgeball battles

settle the score in team-based multiplayer matches. Throw, catch, pass, dodge, and tackle your way to dodgeball dominance. I mean, really, in a nutshell, this is just where you get to implement everything that you learned from Patches O'Houlihan in Dodgeball the Movie. Oh, yeah. Just remember, if you can dodge a wrench, Paul. Yes. If you can dodge traffic, you can can dodge a ball are you a fan of the dodge ball movie josh i it's i am i loved it it's i'll be honest it's been a long time since i've seen it yeah it's like kind of all those movies back from that era i really need to just sit down one weekend and watch like dodgeball and zoolander and like meet the parents you know all those great

like ben stiller movies uh-huh you know i i really do need to just go back and watch those because it's been way too long and they're all great one of my all-time favorite quotes is when the one team doesn't have enough players and the announcer says well they're gonna have to forfeit and then jason bateman is like bold strategy cotton let's see if it works for him. And I quote that all the time. Anyone, someone says something half-brained as a strategy, it's like, oh, bold strategy, Cotton. All right. So, Josh, how would you describe Knockout City for the people? So Knockout City is a 3v3 competitive dodgeball game.

Competitive dodgeball. Yeah, it really is. That's really it in a nutshell. This game started to get talked about a lot, like really quickly, really fast. They did a kind of open play weekend. They called it the block party weekend where people could hop in for free and check it out. That's what we wound up doing

in the beginning was to say, hey, people are talking about this. Let's hop in there. Let's see what it's all about. And it is very much just dodgeball. And a lot of people, I remember thinking like, how is dodgeball going to work as a video game, right? Is it going to be like three dudes standing on one side of the court and I'm, you know, three other guys on the other side, like how do they do this? But they have some good level design in this game. You know, the mechanics are easy to pick up. You know, I want to say they're hard to master, but I don't. This is not like Rocket League where I feel like there's an infinite ceiling in this game but in simplest terms it's three on three like ultimate dodgeball man so you had mentioned the game being played on interesting maps and i

think that's a kind of a good place to start because if it was just a wide open basketball court that you're throwing balls it would not be very fun but these levels are pretty inventive there are ledges where you can fall off cliffs or maybe even throw someone off a cliff, which we'll cover in a minute here. There are always things like rotating in the middle or passageways that close and then open. And the maps are also very vertical.

So a lot of times you can get to high ground or you can do things that give you a different vantage point. And I thought that they did a very good job on developing these maps. They feel very different. I'm with you 100% on this. The maps in this game are honestly great for what they need to be in this game. They're small enough that you're not trucking around the whole map forever looking for somebody

to throw a ball at. They have enough, like you said, verticality that it's not just you on the same plane as other people. I think they did a really good job on the map. So I give them a lot of credit on that because anytime you're playing a game and I go, oh yeah, I like this map. And then it switches. And then I go, oh yeah, I like this map. That's a good sign, right? That just shows you that they've done something right there. Everybody's going to have that one map that they just don't like more than the rest. But in this game, I thought they did a very, very good job on the level design. Couldn't agree more.

And so let's talk a little bit about the mechanics. So why don't you go ahead and describe how this works with throwing and catching the dodgeball? Yeah. So they did a good job here and again of keeping the mechanics fairly simple, right? You grab the ball. All you got to do is just run over the ball. Your guy picks it up. The longer you hold down the button, you'll charge up like the power of the throw. Okay. So, you know, if you're going to just absolutely like wing it at the guy, you just hold your button down and it kind of glows and you know it's fully charged. You can just straight tap the button right away and he'll do this kind of really wimpy slow throw, which does have its place in the game.

And that's it. It's got a fairly good auto lock-on to the person that you're looking at. If you look at somebody else, the lock-on kind of changes to them. And you wing it and the ball homes in on them. It's not like a first person shooter where you have to like click heads and track and stuff like that. Like it knows who you're throwing the ball at and then you throw the ball at them and it does kind of the rest of the work for you. If you are getting the ball thrown at you, you can see when it's coming and you just

tap a button and your guy puts his arms out and he catches the ball. So it's very, very forgiving in the mechanic aspect as far as a newbie hopping into this game. There's movement stuff. I remember you can front flip and you can twirl. It's almost a straight rip off of the glider from Fortnite, where if you jump off a ledge and you press jump again, your guy will pop out a little glider and float down. But those are the basic mechanics. It's very simple for anybody to jump into this game and throw a ball at somebody and catch a ball. Yeah, so to add into what you already covered there, you can also have different kinds of throws. So it's not just a straight-up throw straight at the other person. If you have your character spin and then you throw, they will actually throw it like a massive curve ball. So you can decide whether

you want to curve this from the right and then come back around to the left or to the left and come back to the right. So you can actually aim at someone. And even if they hide around a pillar, a lot of times you can spin and throw it in certain ways to try to hit them. Similarly, you can also do a forward flip and then throw the dodgeball, and then they throw it with a really high arc. So, you know, the game, you can't just sit behind cover the whole time. You're still vulnerable. The game does let you get pretty inventive with how you're going to throw things. And probably the hardest thing is catching the ball you do have to be pretty precise on when you hit that right click and a lot of times if someone does throw the wimpy change up throws

straight at you you click it too early and you can't click it again because there's a little bit of a cool down they don't let you mash the right click button to catch so a lot of times i would find myself mistiming the catches or if the other team's well coordinated and they throw, cause the game doesn't have just one ball, the whole map's littered with dodge balls. And if all three people throw balls at you at slightly different intervals, it's really hard to try to catch multiple balls like that. More than likely you're going to take some damage. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I did like about this, because initially I thought it was just how hard you throw the ball. Do I charge it a whole lot? Do I just chuck it real slow?

What do I do here? And then I remember playing and some dude kept throwing these lob shots at me, which were just completely obliterating me because I didn't know how he was doing it. I didn't know what was going on. And then some guy curved a ball around a pillar and it just doinked me right in the head and took me out. And that's when I was like, oh, wait a minute. There's a little bit more going on here than the basic mechanics. And that is where that front flip that I referenced, the twirl that I referenced, I knew I could do that stuff, but I didn't know why. So if you front flip and throw the ball, that's how you lob the ball. If you twirl and you throw it, that's how you put that really strong curve on it and stuff like that. So that's when I started realizing, hey, this game's actually got a little bit deeper

mechanics than what it would appear at first thought. And I remember it was great when we were throwing those shots at people that didn't know because the game had just come out. And so that was like, this guy doesn't know what this lob shot is. Watch this. Or this guy's hiding behind that pillar. You know, I'm going to curve it around and then you just see him,

you know, get taken out. And that was great. And then, you know, I just remember coming up against this team that was super coordinated and it was like, we got wrecked, man.

And then it was like, I think there's more to this game than initially, even like learning the shots lets on because you start to get into the strategy. One thing we didn't talk about is you can grab. So I guess maybe we can talk about the different types of dodge balls that they have. But one neat mechanic is that if you can't find a ball, because it does happen occasionally, there's a lot of dodgeballs, but every now and then you're

running around and you need a ball to fight with, you can actually have your buddy on your team ball up and grab him and use him as a ball, which is hilarious in its own right. But then if you charge up that throw, instead of just winging it at the guy, it will turn him into like a bomb. You throw him straight up in the air. And then if you were the guy that got thrown, you can kind of target where you want to land and you'll drop down like this bomb and detonate and it'll take out everybody that's in that area. It's like Doomfist's ult in Overwatch. Oh, perfect example. You just don't move as fast. You're a very slow-moving Doomfist ult. Yeah, so that's a really neat thing.

So you can grab a buddy and throw them to close distance, so you don't have to convert them into the bomb. But that's kind of interesting. And then we have to also mention passing. Now, this was my biggest frustration in playing this game solo queue no one ever wanted to pass and no one seemed to understand the benefit of passing everyone just wants to hold down and stare someone straight in the face while they're staring right back and then you throw the ball and of course they catch it because they're staring right at you but what's the benefit of

passing when you pass the ball the ball so as you pass the ball, the ball... So as you charge the ball and you throw it at somebody, if they catch it, the ball gets more charged. And then they wing it at you, and it just gets faster and faster. So it does get harder to catch. If you pass the ball to a buddy, it instantly gets fully charged. So there's this huge benefit of, I just picked this dodgeball up. Instead of sitting there and holding the button down for two seconds and waiting for it to fully charge, well, like you said, the opponent is just standing there going, go ahead and throw it at me. I'm ready. Yeah. Right. Exactly. You can pass it to your buddy that might be off to the side, and then he gets to wing a fully charged dodgeball right away. And there is a huge benefit to that.

And I'm with you. Nobody passes the ball in this game. And what's so funny is I saw like a tweet from the developer of this game where he's sitting like at his desk in front of his monitor and he's just looking at the camera and he's going, guys, pass the ball.

You gotta pass it. Pass the ball. I'm telling you, I made this game. Pass the ball. It's literally the most important mechanic. It really is. Yes. Because you don't know where you're going to get hit from. It's instantly charged. You don't have that charge up time, which is going to telegraph to your opponent. Hey, I'm about to throw this at you. Get ready to catch it. It's really huge. And the passing in this game is effortless. You literally click one button and it passes it to your closest teammate. You don't have

to be looking at him. You don't have to even know he's there. It's just push the pass button, pass the ball. Good to go. Yeah. Now, I know that one thing that you said is that you feel like the ceiling of skill in Rocket League is so much higher than Knockout City. I do agree that it's higher, but I have been watching a lot of video of the, quote, pros of Knockout City, and it is amazing what some of these teams will do. Teams will grab one guy as he balls up. They'll throw him in the air. They'll grab another guy, throw him at the guy already in the air. That guy throws him even higher, and then they'll pass him a ball while he's up in the air. And so he's now diving down. They throw him the ball. He can hit anybody.

So there is so much that you can do as long as you have a well-coordinated team that is communicating and understands how to use these mechanics properly. The game is a little bit of a poop show in the beginning when you're playing with random people. No one seems to understand how the game works, but there can be a lot of fun as long as you're playing with the right people. It can be quite entertaining. Now, one thing we have not talked about so much yet are the special balls so every match that you play it'll randomize the map but it also randomizes one special ball so it'll be either a sniper ball a moon ball a cage ball multi ball or the bomb ball do you have

a particular favorite out of the bunch easy easy which easy. Which one? Cage ball. Oh, the cage ball is great. I love the cage ball. So the cage ball, if you throw it and you hit somebody, it traps them in a tiny little ball-shaped cage. Like a bird cage. And they're locked in there for a second. So then what you do is you run over to them, you pick them up, and they're sitting there shouting,

going, help me, help me! And you turn around and you chuck them off the side of the map. Now, there's two ways that you can score a point in this game. You can hit somebody twice. It takes two hits to knock somebody out. Or once if you threw a teammate at them. Or you can knock them off of a ledge. And there's lots of ledges in this game, too.

So, I mean, I fell to my death probably more than people took me out. But grabbing somebody that's trapped in the cage ball and then just chucking them off the side of the map is hilarious and so much fun. It is so satisfying when you're able to pull that off. And it's funny too, because when you get thrown inside the cage ball, you can mash your button to try to get out and then you'll always see where you chuck a guy you know 400 feet off the ledge they'll break it and then they'll try to glide their way back and you can just tell like this guy's not gonna make it and now he's just wasting time hurting his team and you just see his little glider coming back at you know four

miles an hour and just slowly you're just laughing. You're just laughing at them the whole time. Yeah, it's great. It's fantastic. It really is. It's the trolliest of the balls there, which is, I love it. I always got most excited when I saw the cage ball. Oh, yeah. I love the fact that they incorporate these special balls. It really does help mix it up.

They're fairly plentiful, which is interesting. You know, you think that maybe they would make like one on a map or something like that. But I think they do it more to just mix up the actual gameplay. Because it's not uncommon for each team to have a special ball. And then if somebody uses it, you can go collect it too. The bomb ball is just on a timer. So you have to throw it. It's going to explode after a certain amount of time.

The multi-ball is exactly what it says. You can throw one and then you get to throw another one and then another one after that. The sniper ball is like if you hypercharge it, it basically shoots out like a sniper rifle. The other person, I don't even know if it's possible to catch it, but even if it is, they're not catching it.

We talked about the cage ball. I think that's it, right? The moon ball. Oh, the moon ball. Yeah, I mean the moon ball's kind of lame. The moon ball lets you jump higher. Yeah. And you can kind of float in the air for a second. That one's pretty boring, to be honest.

You jump, like, twice as high. It's not even, like, it lets you jump 20 feet in the air. Yeah. It's by far the least sexy of all the special balls. Yeah, for sure. All right. the least sexy of all the special walls for sure all right so you know obviously we're kind of having to wrap up this episode here there's a lot more we could say but you know what does the community think of knockout city josh all right so this game has also not been out very long uh they have started this game with the kind of you you know, initially this game is, and it still is to this

day, is like 29, 20 bucks, 29, something like that to purchase. They did the free block party weekend that went over fairly well. So they extended that. They still give new players like a free trial up to like level 25 or something. So there's really no risk in picking this game up and trying it out. But if you find that you like it, you're going to have to pay for it. This is not a free-to-play game, at least not right now. I could see how they make it a free-to-play model, but this is straight up a paid game. All right. So first review is recommended. This person has 31 hours on record, so they've played a good bit. Getting bullied by three people with dodgeballs. Feels like I'm in seventh grade PE again. 10 out of 10.

And it's funny because it's true. Because if the other team focuses you, you're toast. There's not anything you can really do if three of the opposing team are targeting you and throwing at you. You might as well just be like, yeah, I give up. I'm dead. All right. So second one, this is another recommended 12.4 hours. Using the map to your own advantage and playing as a team? No. Using your teammates as balls? Yes. Yeah. Knockout City is just full of brainless players that just want to grab a ball, hold left click and throw it. It can be pretty frustrating. It really can.

Okay. And then this is the last one I'll read on here because I know we're short on time. So this is a not recommended. Two hours on record. Sadly riddled with cheaters. Game's pretty new, so may be able to be fixed soon. Cheaters? And that's when i was like okay number

one you're an idiot because how does somebody cheat in this game that's someone who doesn't you can't headshot people like they you can't make it to where they can't catch the ball that's someone who like thinks they're cheating by throwing the curves or something like i don't know exactly what i thought is somebody threw a curve shot at them and they like they were out of this guy's hacking yeah that's bananas that's just not true i i don't even know how you would hack i guess like wall clipping like that would be really obvious yeah there's no like obvious way to cheat in knockout city yeah no maybe maybe the other person had like the sniper ball and the guy was like, he threw that way too fast!

That's not possible! It's not riddled with cheaters. I can personally vouch for that. That one made me laugh, so I had to throw it in there, because I don't know how you cheat in Knockout City. Alright, Paul. So, that's the reviews. It is time to guess what... You want me to go first on this one. Sure. Go ahead.

Why not? Okay. Um, my guess was knockout city. I've seen people talking about it a lot. Like I know that you like this game a lot. I had fun with it for the time that I was playing it. I figured it was going to be fairly high.

I guess 91%. All right. I literally wrote down 91% as my initial guess. I have not seen the score on Steam, so I don't know. I'm going to go one below you and say 90, and the reason why is that you can play for free, and I bet

you're going to get a lot of negative reviews from people who would never drop money, but since they played it and didn't like it, they'll leave a negative review. So you said 91. I'll go 90. Did you really write down 91? Yeah, we have the same guess. We sure did.

Do you know what the actual is, Paul? Oh, please tell me it's 91. It's 91%. Oh, you nailed it. So if I had gone first, I would have said 91. And I would have had to move it. But it is 100%. It's 91%. And then what's funny is I wrote down my answers for both of these earlier today.

And then I went to grab the reviews and stuff. And then I saw it was 91%. And I'm like, people are going to think I cheated on this one. But then when you said 91%, I was like, no way. Oh, how funny. So I win, Paul, since you didn't stick to your guns and insist on your 91 guess there. No, I had to switch it up. We could have shared.

Yeah. All right, Josh, you get to do it, buddy. Let's hit that music. All right. Hey, baby, I hope you're on the other team because you're a knockout to me. There it is. Maybe implying that I'm knocking somebody out with a dodgeball is not the best way. That's how you tell someone you like them when you're in like third grade, right?

Yeah. Pull your hair or something, right? Okay. So we've already done this once this episode. I don't think we need to go over it again. Here's my thoughts. I alluded to this on, we kind of talked about Knockout City briefly on a This Week in Gaming episode. I had a lot of fun with this game for about three hours, and then it just got stale to me quickly. I don't know if it's that I realized that, yes, there is a higher level of gameplay involved. I don't know that I'm willing to put in the energy or the effort to get good at this game and try to build a team around it to get competitive. And it might've just been that it was a free weekend. I don't know. Maybe it was just a small player base still. Maybe the player base has picked up since then, but I felt like we

were being put up against these super coordinated teams and just getting wrecked like over and over again. I just, I stopped having fun with it fairly quickly. I want to say, I think it's a make love because I think that there's going to be a lot of people out there that enjoy this game. But for me, I think I'm spoiled by Rocket League, which is a completely different game, but it's also like a 3v3, very easy to pick up, extremely high skill ceiling. I'd rather just play Rocket League. This game is exactly the same genre. It is a sports game that has an arcade take, simplistic buttons, but hard to master. Whereas I am really bad at trying to manage space and timing in Rocket League, I can very easily manage that by timing, catching, and throwing. So I'm on the polar opposite i think it's a mary i love knockout city i was so sad when you said you didn't want to play anymore because i was

playing solo i was having fun solo so imagine how much more fun it would be if we were on there with a three pack and so uh yeah i think this is incredibly similar to Rocket League. Really? Yeah. Oh, how dare you insult Rocket League like that? Hey, 91% of people. Most people do enjoy it. It's a fun game.

I'll qualify this because I don't know if I said this to you on air or off air, but I think part of my issue was that when I was playing, the free weekend was over. And to keep playing, you had to spend $29.99 to buy this game. And I was like, I'm not going to spend... I can't remember if it's $20 or $30. I'm just going to say $20. It's $20. It's $20. Is it just $20? Okay. Yeah. You started making me second guess, but I wrote it down. It's $20. I just was like, I don't want to spend $20 for this game. And then I'm already kind of getting tired of it. I don't know that I want to spend $ bucks on it just to know that I'm getting tired of it.

If this game stays free to play, I think I'd be more than happy to hop in with you and another person and actually try to do the three on three. But if you're telling me that the only way I'm going to keep playing is to pay $20, I'm out at that point. So if they keep it free, I'm down to play. Honestly, that might change my opinion of it. But I think that's part of the reason I'm saying murder is I'm not going to pay $20 to not really enjoy playing this game. Because I'm going up against three stacks that have 50 hours and are just obliterating me. So maybe that's not a fair murder, but that's where I'm at right now.

I feel like it's just down to your personal preference. The game, I think, functions incredibly well. If you're going to make a dodgeball game, I feel like that's a real uphill battle. And I feel like they just did it so incredibly well. Now, if your choice is to pay 20 for knockout city or play rocket league for free i think 99 of people are just going to play rocket league so it is at a disadvantage there but if epic bought this game out and made it free then you know i do think that you would have some people who would choose Knockout City, like me, over Rocket League,

simply because I whiff every aerial in Rocket League. I gotta give you credit. I remember you caught every dodgeball that people winged at you, man. I would mistime it a lot, but I remember at one point I was like, Dang, Paul, you caught all those! It's all those Mario Party minigames that I played all those years. All right, well, let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up. All right, Josh, it's been a while since we have been on kind of polar opposites for ranking this game. Boy, this is going to be tough. I'm not too sure where to even start. You tell me what you think. I'm willing to be more

lenient on Knockout City just because I can concede that it is a fun game to play and that it's going to be very approachable for a lot of people. I had a lot of fun with it. It's not like I hated this game from the beginning. It's just that about four hours in, I just kind of went, I don't really want to play a whole lot more, and I'm certainly not paying $20 for this game to do that. Yeah. When I take a look at the leaderboard, it's definitely going to be below everything in the top 22. So talking about keep talking and nobody explodes that's at 22 no way it's going to be above that however i would put it above everything that's from like 28 and down so it takes two phasmophobia payday two i think it's definitely better than all those so i

was kind of thinking somewhere in the mid-20s you know so it's not exactly in the middle of the leaderboard a little bit lower than that i feel like i think with where you and i are that might be you'd rather play knockout city than star wars squadrons and i think as a team-based game it's probably better you know like as much as i love squadrons in the beginning like we started to see that team team play is not the end all and be all on that game you know it's it was kind of like every pilot for themselves a little bit like i get that it's probably evolved a little bit since then because we haven't played it in a while i mean it seems to be like one i can't imagine you're gonna put this over rim world i know how much you love rim world so is that the

good spot for it is putting it at 24 and bumping star wars squadrons down um so it would actually be 25 simply because we just added operation right yeah so i think that's fair so we'll have it below a way out rim world and then we'll have knockout city and it'll be above star wars squadrons and gtfo I think that's fair. Interestingly, we have a lot of these co-op games right around the 20 range. I think that's totally fair. We'll go ahead and lock it in at 25. I wonder why that is. You're right.

It takes two around there. We've got this one. Raft is at 19. Yeah, they're all right there. Co-op games are great, but is it just that once you play them, there's not a ton of replayability? I think that's exactly what it is. They all kind of have a built-in timer. They're only going to be good for so long.

Yeah, but they are really good, too, when you're playing them. That's too funny. Yeah, that's a good point. Right in the mid-20s is all the two-player co-op games. Exactly. Well, yeah. So once again, if you want to check out that full leaderboard, come visit MultiplayerPodcast.com. And we did pretty good time-wise, Josh. We knew this one was going to be over an hour, but we didn't go too, too far over. We will be back with our next episode on Thursday, where we cover this week in gaming

and then if you guys want to play our next deep dive game it is going to be satisfactory so 100 100 this time no we've put in way too much time already into satisfactory we're gonna have to talk about it so if you wanted to play that one here over the next two weeks that will be covered on the second monday after this one releases so that's about it come check us out on social media at multiplayer pod and you can be a patreon supporter by visiting multiplayer squad.com we'll see you guys on thursday You know what, Paul? It takes two to tango with our podcast, and this episode was a knockout.

Good job, buddy. Did you see how I did both games there right at the end? You worked them right both ways. This is why you get paid the big bucks. I practiced that all day. See you, everybody.