Couch co-op, while thought dead for a while, has made a bit of a comeback in recent years. That’s not to say we are being inundated with releases, but we have been lucky enough to get a few real gems. EA brought us the gripping prison escape tale A Way Out while All In! Games treated us to the excellent fixer-upper Tools Up. However my first sign that local co-op was going through a bit of a renaissance was when Team17 published the groundbreaking Overcooked and Overcooked 2 in 2016 and 2018 respectively.
Moving Out not only shares a publisher with the Overcooked series, it plays very similar as well. The premise is easy; you and up to three of your friends are removal experts tasked with packing up peoples lives into your removal truck as delicately as possible. Anyone familiar with Overcooked will know that this is when the carnage and hilarity begins. Make sure you have a strong relationship with your chosen co-op partner. My significant other is a forgiving soul. She even let me still sleep in the bed after I told her to “Just pick up your side of the f’n couch and get it through the door!”.
Upon reflection, tossing the couch out the window – a method she had suggested – was the correct course of action. Not only was it quicker, but it was an item that could survive such rough treatment. My misses rarely touches games, yet she had identified the best route to success in the heat of the moment. That’s one of the beauties of Moving Out. It keeps things simple and allows casual and non gamers to get just as much enjoyment out of it as seasoned pros. That’s really important in a party game, especially in our current lockdown scenario.
Making this game even more appealing is the numerous accessibility options. You have assist mode, which lets you enable any and all of the following;
If that isn’t enough there is even a slider for the size of the user interface, allowing you to scale everything to suit yourself and those you play with. There is also a dyslexic friendly option that alters the font and weight of the text. These options may be something that many gamers will never use, but I have to applaud SMG Studio for going above and beyond to make their game fun for the whole family.
As I said earlier the name of the game is to essentially move all the highlighted items from the premises to your van. Planning is key. You want to move the bigger, more sturdy items first. No-one wants to see the results of you tossing an arm chair on top of a vase. You’ll have a certain time in which to move everything, so sometimes it’s best to use your first run to scout the area and potential best methods out before restarting with a working idea of how you want to tackle the level.
You start with six customisable characters, including my favourite – a lad with a toaster for a head. It’s a nice touch having the option to switch up your look, although characters are unique only in aesthetic. Some levels will throw spanners into the works like the house being haunted. In this scenario ghosts will mess with items, making your job much harder. This is where the dedicated slap button comes in. You can stun them briefly with a swing of your right hand. Careful though, the urge to get into a handbags at dawn slapping battle with your co-op partner is at times overpowering.
By using coins earned throughout the game you can unlock arcade levels that while deeply frustrating at times can also be a lot of fun. These are shorter levels that task you with things like navigating furniture around a crazy assault course. It’s a lot of fun and does well to pad out the admittedly short campaign.
The cartoon art style is very much in the vein of an Overcooked and Tools Up which suits the tone of the game perfectly. There are plenty of nice little animation touches like power appliances having to be forcefully ripped from the socket. The game performs at a solid frame rate with no noticeable drops even when the action gets more frantic with four players. As far as technical issues, I did have some problems with furniture getting stuck in awkward positions near doorways and the likes. It could be argued that this is part of the manic gameplay, but it did get frustrating at times.
The trophy list is solid. There are certain story beats you have to hit, culminating in getting gold medals in every level. There are also an ample amount of misc objectives like throwing a certain number of items, smashing 100 windows, beating a level in under a minute and even sitting on every toilet in the game. Achieving 111% is likely the last trophy you will get and looks to be a formidable challenge, but you’ll have plenty of fun along the way.
Overall Moving Out is the next great local co-op party game. The lack of online play is disappointing, but with all the accessibility options this is a title that will bring gamers and non gamers together. If you enjoyed games of a similar ilk like Overcooked you can’t go wrong with this title. It may suffer a little from being more of the same, but when what came before it changed the game for local co-op, that is not a bad thing. Given the strange circumstances the world finds itself in, this release couldn’t have came at a better time.
-Jock
A review code for this product was kindly provided by the publisher. Reviewed on PS4.
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