Review: Moving Out

It’s impossible to talk about Moving Out without bringing Overcooked into the conversation. If you’ve ever played the absolutely mental local co-op cooking game, then you’re all set for a dose of Moving Out, a game where you and up to 3 friends try to get stuff out of a building into a truck within a certain time, by chucking things around, flinging TVs out of windows and trying not to smack each other round the face. It’s insane, it’s often agonising, and it’s absolutely hilarious.

If you haven’t got anyone to play local co-op with, you might as well look away now. Moving Out is considerably better with others around you than just playing it by yourself. Trying to coordinate carrying a sofa (that needs two people to lift it) with someone else while worming your way round a house and not break a vase, table or door along the way is frustrating and amazing in equal measure. We shouted plenty of Chuckle Brothers “to you, to me” references while playing, and the number of times one of us yelled a Ross Geller “PIVOT” while trying to get a corner sofa through the front door (which has long since been taken off its hinges) was insane.

The objective is to get everything into the moving truck, something you can do by either placing it carefully or, more likely, throw stuff in. Throwing something by yourself it easy enough, but if it’s a heavy item that needs two to throw you’ll need to synchronise your throw to make sure it doesn’t end up being thrown in completely the wrong direction and ending up in the river or under a nearby car.

But the throwing doesn’t start at the truck. As you’re moving things out of the buildings, you can throw stuff to each other, toss stuff out of a 2nd floor window, even off a train and onto a chasing truck. It times you’ll have delicate items that need a bit of finesse and care – drop or throw them and they’ll break, and that’s not great. So what to do when you’ve got a few of them to get across a river? Well, you throw them to each other. Get the aim and catch right and you’ll be slinging fragile packages around without a care in the world. Get it wrong, and there’s that horrible crunch of broken glass and the knowledge your gold star for the level has just gone out the window.

Levels get progressively tougher, with tricky timing being required to successfully complete the later levels. Between myself, my wife and our 7 year old we managed every level eventually, but quite a few took multiple turns and more than one gaming session to allow us to calm down an take stock of what we needed to do. Without the youngest of the three of us things were far less annoying (he had a habit of flinging packages into water as the timer ran out just for a laugh) but the challenge is still huge if you want the gold medals. I still have no idea how you’re meant to complete some of those levels in the time you’re given.

So if you’ve got some people to play with, and they can sit in the same room, then you should be looking to pick this up to have some amazing, funny gaming sessions. It’s such great fun. But on your own? Probably not so much. It’s a co-op game through and through, and should be played as such.

Reviewed on PS4

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