Armed and Gelatinous Preview

Armed and Gelatinous is to gaming what a shot of espresso is to a tired London-bound commuter. Developed by Three Flip Studios, the game is all colour and noise, arriving with a style and polish that you rarely see from games in Early Access.

In some utopian future, mankind has no more need for weapons. The great thinkers of the age all band together and decide the best way to make sure that humankind’s worst inventions are never used again is to blast them into space. Once flying throughout the universe, however, they’re picked up by space-bound amoebae who immediately begin to massacre each other (as you do).

That is about as deep as this 2D local four-player couch game gets. There is an arcade mode on the way but for the purposes of this preview, only the versus mode is available. The versus mode has a number of game modes - nearly all of which entail destroying your opponent in as quick and messy a fashion as possible.

In the Timed, Stock and Deathmatch modes, players are pitted against each other in an arena filled with asteroids. Collecting floating weapons boxes attaches a random armament to the globby body of your amoeba - from revolvers and machine guns to rocket launchers and nuclear warheads - which you can then fire. Each weapon is fixed in place, though, so the aim is to grab as many as you can to fire in all directions.

The little jelly avatars move around with a pleasing fluidity, and grow in size as they gather more weapons, making it harder for opponents to avoid them. Players can also use a damaging charge attack that send them bouncing around the arena like an errant tennis ball.

The only other mode available is a form of Rocket League light - two teams of players try to knock a football into an opposing goal. I actually found myself playing this mode far more than the standard battle modes, but that might just be because I’m obsessed with all things to do with football and it reminded me of the aforementioned car-based soccer sim.

Armed and Gelatinous is fast and furious and its visuals are equally pleasing, if nothing to write home about. The amoeba are bright and easy to discern amongst the debris and particles, and as they grow take on humourous bloated expressions. The weapons all fire projectiles that look very similar, aside from rockets which fire, well, rockets.

Sound-wise the game is chirpy and energetic. The jelly avatars all squeak and make various cute noises as they attempt to murder each other, while the background music remains upbeat and frantic no matter the chaos on screen. The weapon sounds, though obviously as stock as they come, are actually one of the highlights and turn the whole battle into something chuckle-worthy, full of pew pews and kachows.

Couch games are not meant to be overly complex and Armed and Gelatinous doesn’t aim to be anything grandiose. It does what it needs to do and essentially what it says on the tin: it’s a pleasingly designed time-killer for fighting your friends in multiplayer battles. Fans of the genre could do a lot worse than picking this title up, providing they have enough friends to occupy the other three player slots.