Rawmen (PC) - Preview | Phenixx Gaming

I could have sworn that the first time I’d seen or heard of the homoerotic food-fight and Splatoon-like game, Rawmen, it was at E3 2018 or 2019. For the life of me, I can’t find that trailer prior to August 2019, and that’s from PAX West. So either I’ve had some weird dreams that have come to life, or somewhere else I saw something similar. I mean, I’ve summarized Animal LLC’s multiplayer arena shooter pretty-well, I think.

I think they and TinyBuild have done something no other developer really does well enough, even after copious numbers of attempts. I hate multiplayer, I hate people, and I think if I have to spend time around people who find memes endlessly hilarious, I’ll go on a killing spree by the third Untitled Goose Game meme. Nevertheless, I’ve been excited about Rawmen since I either dreamt it up over a year ago or when I’ve seen a slight glimpse of it elsewhere. Who doesn’t want to be locked in with a bunch of men, several pots of odd colored liquid, and several ladles to chuck it all about? I know I do.

So, of course, I anticipated a release, early access release, or something soon. Now, we’re a year on from the initial reveal, and there has been a demo for the alpha, which I’ve been meaning to play for a while. It turns out, not many either knew about this demo or they just don’t care, but why? Well, when I decided to play over this past week’s Steam Autumn game fest thing, where I played the preview for Mars Horizon, I was one of about only four players as far as I know. I thought everyone loved the multiplayer arena shooter genre, has the world moved on? Probably.

Nonetheless, I messed around with the player customization tools and was charmed by that alone. You can have little dog-like creatures in your pot, all the names for changeable bodily features are informally named akin to referencing your cardinal directions as: left, right, up, and down; and wear masks for safety. It all exudes a sense of character to the game that is so often lost by playing this section as straight as possible. From the outset, it is meant to be taken lightly, with even a vague attempt to emulate the voice and rambling speech of Justin Roiland from Rick and Morty as a developer audio note on the main menu.

However, once I was past this point, I thought I’d go into the practice mode and learn the controls. It is all simple enough, you play as a man (or woman) with an apron and a lot of something, hit others with the liquid in the pod, kill them, and whoever has the most points wins. Oh, and you can do a lot of sliding about the place with quite a bit of jumping. There is a fun little arena where you’ll get to grips with the controls, learn the movement of characters, and kill what I can only assume were bots several times a minute. If this practice arena was my interaction with others, count myself as surprised at their inability to do anything but die and hide in a pot.

So soon after this, I’d left the minimalistic practice arena to play the actual game… and it was dead. I tried a few different matches in the regular mode that I’d assume is for everyone, and not once did I see another player in a match. I ended up playing a capture-the-flag type game for nearly 5-minutes on my own, which didn’t really work out as I was the only one playing. There was a game about getting a ball into a goal, again I played that on my own.

This is my problem with multiplayer and the focus on multiplayer-only games. If they aren’t obscenely popular like Fortnite, Among Us, or Fall Guys, no one will play them, and the player base dwindles down to no one. According to Steam Charts [dot] com, the player base of the last three months peaks out at 47 players on October the 10th. According to Steam DB [dot] info, on the same day, 12-thousands people watched it, down on the 27-thousand from June 26th watching it. Since the 10th, numbers fell to about 4-people and these single-digit numbers aren’t helpful when you want to demo a game. Either as a developer or as a prospective player.

I’m not saying I’m rolling around in the fact it is seeing low numbers, I’m more annoyed at the lack of a player-base for one of the few multiplayer-focused games I am excited about. Seeing this when it is the alpha, when people should be the most excited about it, the excitement is dying a little. As a core concept, it is more or less every other multiplayer game, with short matches, a colorful aesthetic, and someone moaning about it (today that’s me). The only thing separating it is the concept of people with pots of colorful liquids spreading that about while wearing very little. I want to see Rawmen at its best.

A Steam PC preview copy of Rawmen was provided by tinyBuild Games for this preview.