PAX East 2013: Battleblock Theater--Hands-On Gameplay

his is my third time here In Boston for PAX East. Meanwhile, this is also the fourth time The Behemoth has been showing off their latest and (maybe) greatest work, Battleblock Theatre. I’ve always been intrigued by The Behemoth and its somewhat askew approach to taking nearly forgotten classic gaming styles and their dead-horse tropes and infusing them with ridiculous levels of crass humour, tough as nails gameplay and hilarious, over-the-top visual elements and animation.

Battleblock Theatre infuses The Behemoth’s secret gameplay and presentation sauce into a puzzle-based action platformer with an emphasis on cooperative play, which I was fortunate to get hands on with alongside level designer Aaron.

The first thing I did was create a character from a default selection of pieces. This gives the game a really personal feel, and with a ton of other prisoners in the game to free, there are all kinds of new elements by which to deck your guy out as the game progresses.

There are, predictably, a lot of hazards to contend with giving it kind of a Super Meat Boy Lite feel that not only dishes a decent challenge but should be more than manageable enough (at least in the beginning) for players to grasp the game’s fundamentals quickly and good progress made steadily. In the case of co-op, the game works brilliantly with team moves such as hurling your partner(s) across huge, wide gaps, multi-switch bridges and more. It also allows for epic moments of success and failure (which can also allow for more success) that will make even the most stone-hearted and steel-faced humbugs grin, guaranteed.

The best part about the co-op is the respawn system; if you somehow fall behind or end up stuck at a certain point but your partner succeeds, if you die, you’ll respawn right alongside them, allowing for progress where a single player might otherwise give up. The stage will also scale to show both players onscreen at once no mater how far they are, though mostly, at least in the stages I played, the stages required more that one person anyway, which kept us more or less together throughout.

Of course, this is all relative since, as with other behemoth games, you can mess with your partners as well, but with little consequence other than the time it will take you to progress. There are also a ton of ways to die, with hilarious and often unexpected death animations.

There also seems to be a good amount of replayability to collect the hundreds of unlockable character pieces to customize your would-be escapee, not to mention a report post-stage that shows all of the collectables you have gotten as well as other awards, such as speed-running.

I had a really great time with Battleblock Theatre. I really enjoyed the hilarious visual presentation, the whacked out premise and the sound design is also pretty great. It left me wanting to play quite a bit more, which is cool, since the release date for this great game is just around the corner. You can grab this fantastic platformer exclusively on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 Microsoft Points on April 3.

When asked about other platform support, Aaron tells us that, while optimally, they would like to have the game on as many services as possible, they can only really dedicate their resources to one game at a time. So while there are no confirmed plans for Battleblock Theater on Steam or PSN just yet, don’t count them out.