In recent years, Amazon Games has become mostly known for its MMOs like Lost Ark and New World, but they are looking to expand beyond that realm. This led to a partnership with new UK-based developer Glowmade for their first game as a team, though the three founders at Glowmade are far from rookies after years at Lionhead Studios before its shutdown in 2016. Very recently, we had an opportunity to get a hands-on preview of their first title, King of Meat, ahead of its official unveiling at gamescom.
Work as a Team
King of Meat is a rather unique 1-4 player hack n’ slash co-op where the goal is to make it through dungeons together as a team and earn the highest points and trophies available. While there is a competitive element technically, with each teammate getting different scores, King of Meat is meant to be more focused on the team aspect, where the collection of points through defeating enemies and picking up gems and such is all for the greater good of the team. This was actually very refreshing, as I feel there are way too few games that go this route instead of being more competitive within your individual teams.
King of Meat takes place in the land of Loregok, a mystical land full of creatures like skeletons, trolls, and more. The general premise is that the world only has one TV show on the market, which is known as King of Meat, where contestants take on dungeons to survive and become the King of Meat. The land of Loregok features a general hub town known as Ironlaw Plaza that is operated by the Komstruct Company where players have everything they need at their disposal.
Before we had a chance to play, the developers told us how the three founders came up with the idea for King of Meat due to their past inspirations. One brought a love for the late ’80s and early ’90s WWF (now WWE), one brought in a love for Jim Henson, and then lastly, one brought in a love for The Greatest Showman. When all brought together, the style of this game made a lot of sense, with its often over-the-top and zany world and characters.
For our preview session, we were able to play as a full group of four people, led by one of the developers. This greatly helped as a way to learn this hub town and where to go between dungeons, though I’m sure the game itself could have a lot more directional markers for those without a developer to lead them. The hub town can be a little confusing to navigate at first with your team because other teams online can also be in the town, which may confuse you on which players are your teammates and which are other players. Even when talking on a mic in person during this, I definitely did get lost a few times when trying to make my way around, though it makes a lot more sense once you get the hang of where everything is located.
Combat in King of Meat is pretty standard, but there was not much that felt like it was breaking the mold of anything, yet it was still a lot of fun to play regardless. Each member of your team wields a main weapon and a projectile. At the start of the game, these are a sword and a crossbow, though you can switch over to a hammer or bomb launcher instead. These do play significantly different, with the sword being fast and easier to wield, while the hammer was more slow and powerful. I enjoyed the different combos that you could utilize with both as well.
From the way the game is setup, it almost feels like there will be additional weapon types to unlock later, as there are countless options that could fit. When asking the developer at the time, they just kept saying that at this point in the game these are all that are available. I definitely do hope there will be more, as only having two primary weapons and two projectile weapons could get pretty repetitive and boring over time.
Customization Is Key
Beyond your basic weapons are special Glory Moves that you can unlock and equip. To start, you have access to two of these, but more can be purchased with a special kind of in-game currency that you earn and then can be set to use. I believe they said you could unlock more spots to equip these beyond just two at a time. These Glory Moves are a lot of fun and can really be tailored to your playstyle. In fact, while there are no character classes in King of Meat, setting certain Glory Moves can essentially serve as a class system.
To start, you have a move where you can belch and deal damage to enemies in your path while also knocking some back or one where you summon a giant horse with its giant hooves teleporting in and dealing damage. While both of these are offensive skills, I quickly purchased one that allowed me to regenerate health, which was quite helpful at times. I think the group favorite, though, was the blackhole Glory Move that, funnily enough, was popped just when a breaker got tripped and our set of computers were shut down, though that was just coincidental, a hilarious coincidence nonetheless. Another one I laughed at but didn’t get to unlock, though, was the Cluster Duck Glory Move.
The main goal in King of Meat is to win gold as a team by beating dungeons with enough points scored to get the gold trophy. There are also silver and bronze trophies that you can unlock for lesser point totals. The difficulty of earning these certain trophies definitely seemed to vary by level, with some levels going to be listed as easy, medium, or hard once the game came out. In our demo, all dungeons were just labeled as easy, but we could definitely tell which ones have a difficulty spike to a significant degree. The point requirements for each trophy will also fluctuate based on other players’ performances on the same levels over time, to where it adds some balance to the overall game system.
In fact, my biggest concern with the game at first was that it felt way too easy. We were dominating all of the enemies we faced and never really had any issues with the platforming sections on the way to the end. However, those concerns were very quickly quelled as we started playing the aforementioned more difficult levels. These not only had more barrages of enemies and stronger bosses but also some very tricky platforming and puzzle segments that caused us some trouble. I vividly remember us narrowly surviving against one of the bosses, with my character being the only one still alive and being able to revive a couple of teammates just as I then died, and we were able to win.
Speaking of the game’s death system, it is pretty unique in itself. If any of the four characters lose all of their health in the dungeon, any other teammate can revive them within a certain amount of time. If this does not happen or no one is able to help revive them, that character can then give up and respawn at certain checkpoints within each stage. However, your team as a whole has a limited number of these respawns available in each stage, so you have to be very careful in the more difficult stages.
One of the most intriguing aspects of King of Meat is that all stages in the game that we played were created by the developers using the same dungeon maker that will also be available in the game for everyone to use. The game itself will include over 100 dungeons made by Glowmade themselves at release, but the dungeon count will obviously grow even more as the community builds its own. That means that anything that is possible in these stages will be possible in custom stages made by players over time. After playing insane levels that people have come up with in Super Mario Maker over the years, I cannot wait to see the creative and downright sadistic levels that some will come up with in King of Meat. Unfortunately, we could not demo the dungeon maker part of the game at all, though it sounds very promising based on how they talked about it.
King of Meat is all about strong personalities with its NPCs that offer you different services. This includes characters such as Buzzworth Billy, Professor Beak, Orsa, and Sparktongue, who can offer you quests, weapon upgrades, and much more. These vendors do become very important to where you should be checking in with most of them after each dungeon just to see if you have unlocked anything or have any currency to spend.
One aspect of the game I can foresee is the introduction of actual microtransactions, but they likely would be relegated to just cosmetics in the game. If that is, in fact, the case, I would assume. As the game was set up so far, you earn gold in the matches and then can spend it at the different vendors, including getting different-looking weapons and outfits and getting stickers and more to affix to your character. There is a lot of customization when it comes to the characters, which I really did appreciate and had a lot of fun playing around with. One of my favorite early weapon skins was a hammer skin that made it look like you are attacking with a sausage link, which never got old.
As mentioned previously, King of Meat doesn’t even have any specific archetypes for the characters; you can pick any kind of look and design for your character and be on an entirely level playing ground with others. We did not have access to affordable emotes in our time with the game, with them being incredibly high priced, but the developer did say that would change in the game itself, though I do wonder if that’s where microtransactions may also come into play.
This preview event also gave us a glimpse at one other game mode that does turn King of Meat into a solo experience in the survival-themed Slay of the Day. This level lets you play to see how long you can stay alive with hordes of enemies and obstacles coming at you in a smaller arena than you are used to from the other mode. This definitely had a lot more intensity to it, which is a nice change of pace for the overall gameplay. While it is called Slay of the Day, I’m hoping that means we’ll get actual daily arenas to attempt, but they were not able to confirm that at the time of the preview. I’m also hoping this means we’ll get some other single-player style content or even other unique co-op game modes that differ from the core gameplay we were shown.
A Lot More to Learn
King of Meat is obviously still in development, with no indication to us of a release date, but I thought the visuals and performance were very solid for what we played. You obviously can’t simulate how such a game will perform online with tons of people online, but I really liked the idea of the pick-up-and-play nature of the game where you can team up with players to do a dungeon for a few minutes of spare time and then stop playing until later. I feel like too many competitive games require more of a time sink that a game like this would not require, allowing players to just jump in and play with friends or random players online whenever they would like.
It’s hard to fully judge a brand new game in a limited setting, but I can see King of Meat attracting a solid audience online for those wanting a less competitive style of gameplay, though the ultimate success, I think, will hinge on the game’s dungeon maker and how well that takes off. Either way, I’m definitely interested to learn more and hope to hear of a release window for King of Meat that will be coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.
