Fall Guys is getting a shot in the arm this week with the introduction of the long-awaited level creator, which players can use to build their own levels (known as rounds). Before season four goes live on May 10th, I had the chance to tinker around with the creative mode on a PC preview build. The mode will be available on all platforms. It’s a fairly robust toolkit that Mediatonic plans to build out significantly in the coming years.
For now, users are restricted to building race rounds and they only have two themes to choose from. Levels need to have a start line and a finish line, and it’s up to you to decide what goes in between (probably chaos).
Creative mode is debuting with what Mediatonic describes as a “greatest hits” of Fall Guys platforms and obstacles, including the Door Dash gates, slime floors, a cannon that can launch houses at players and, of course, Yeetus (a big rotating hammer). While the options might not be as extensive as some may have hoped, there’s enough here for fiendish level creators to get started with.
Having a limited set of pieces at the outset may not be a bad thing. Constraints can foster creativity, as we’ve seen in the past with the old 140-character limit on tweets (which can now, regrettably, be up to 10,000 characters long) and short-form video.
The creative mode controls are a little janky, unfortunately, especially on a keyboard. You’ll need to use the plus and minus keys (which are on the opposite side of my keyboard from the other buttons) to move pieces vertically. The preview build I was using didn’t have the option to rebind the creative mode controls. Hopefully, that’s something Mediatonic addresses swiftly.
Aside from that, creating a level is a cinch. It doesn’t take long to build a tower with fans, bounce pads and boxing gloves that can send beans off the map and back to the start line if they’re not careful. You can’t go too off the rails with your rounds, though. There’s a limit on how many objects you can include and you’ll need to beat your levels yourself before you can publish and share them.
The creative mode had to be robust, since Mediatonic is using the same tools to build its own levels. The toolset has allowed the developers to create 50 new rounds for this season, more than ever before.
Extensive options for creativity have helped Fortnite enshrine itself as one of the biggest games in the world. Mediatonic and Epic will surely be hoping that this update will help do the same for Fall Guys. At the very least, it could bring back some lapsed players.
I probably won’t spend too much time building my own rounds. I made one, Marie Kondo-inspired level in Super Mario Maker 2 and then went back to trying out other players’ creations. I’ll surely dip back into the Fall Guys creative mode as Mediatonic adds more obstacles (I’d like to try building my own version of Slimb Climb), but I’m mainly looking forward to seeing what nonsense other players come up with.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-fall-guys-level-creator-promises-more-chaos-than-ever-150034998.html?src=rss