Posted in: Amazon Game Studios, Games, Video Games | Tagged: Glowmade, King Of Meat

We Got To Try Out King Of Meat Ahead Of Its Gamescom Reveal

Before Amazon Games revealed their latest game, King Of Meat, during Gamescom 2024, we got to try the game out for ourselves

A couple of days ago, Amazon Games and developer Glowmade revealed their latest game, King of Meat, during Opening Night Live at Gamescom 2024. But before all of that took place, the company was kind enough to invite us to a private event to play the game in some of the first play sessions before the public. Along with a bunch of other journalists and content creators, we got to play a few rounds of the game with the devs, as well as explore many of the game's options. Here's what our experience was like.

King of Meat offers up a cool co-op experience that feels like a mix of a few different genres as you all run through a crazy gauntlet of pain and treasure. First off, you'll start by making a character out of some of the freebie costumes and helmets they have. You'll also have the option of choosing what your primary weapon will be, as you can go for either a sword or a sledgehammer. Hammer is slower but does more damage; the sword is average, but you get more slashes in. It's all up to you how you wish to play. You also have a small crossbow at your disposal for hitting enemies from afar or using it to hit targets at specific times.

Once that's all squared away, you'll pair up with three other people to head off to the courses. You can choose the difficulty of what you want to play, and as you may have gathered, the higher the risk, the greater the reward, but you can't screw up as much as you could in easier courses. Every course comes with a three-tier objective based on how much gold and treasures you manage to make it to the end with. When you die, you lose what you snagged. While individual pride is fun, there is no bonus beyond standing on a podium at the end. This is a TEAM effort, and failure to act as a team will cost everyone equally.

We tried out several courses while we were with the team, getting a pretty good idea of the kinds of difficulty we'd experience. The easy ones were pretty straightforward: find all the gold and make it to the end in one piece without dying. Which was still a challenge as those courses are primarily made up of hazards and traps, with the occasional puzzle and hidden object to find. But as the difficulty ramped up, so did the enemies who wanted to see you dead by any means necessary. Some of them were basically gauntlet challenges with a variety of foes who needed to be defeated in specific ways. I really enjoyed the ones where we got to launch bombs at them, although the bombs could hurt teammates as well.

The biggest challenge for King of Meat was dealing with large enemies. As you can see from the images here, you'll find foes four times your size, which can pounce hard and change the room in various ways. This is really where teamwork comes into play, as sometimes it comes down to people switching off the combat while others dodge. Other times, it comes down to players figuring out the specific strategy and working together on a common goal to wither them down hit by hit. But none of the fights ever felt repetitive or boring or by-the-numbers. They all felt like a challenge!

Once you beat a level, you head back into the city, where you can do a number of things. First, you collect your winnings at the local bar. Then you spend them on outfits, some of which you can see here. Some of them are parts of bigger ensembles; others are one-offs that you can mix and match. But overall, none of them do anything special. For that, you want to go find the people who sell perks and add-ons, which can be used to help everyone in the match (like getting health and adding a quick damage boost) or just yourself with some awesome weapons (such as a grenade that sends a ton of quacking ducks at people).

The other fun aspect that we talked about but didn't get to so much with was the Level of Customization. This is basically your playground to make a King of Meat level and challenge all of your friends and anyone onlookers who wish to check out your level. You'll have tons of assets and tools at your disposal to make a level however you see fit based on what's available in the game. Then, you can load it up and allow people to download the maps for their own challenges. We assume that, being a PC title, we'll see a ton of Steam Workshop integration, but where the fans take it will most likely be up to them.

Overall, I thought King of Meat was super fun! It has great challenges and a lot of things you can do, but the big part was enjoying playing the game with others and getting a kick out of accomplishing goals together as we looted everything in sight. That said, we do recognize we're playing a limited form of the game that we won't see for several more months. So we'll keep an eye open as we wait to see what they bring to the table.

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