Over the past year or so, I’ve been keeping a light watch on SWAPMEAT, One More Game’s co-op meat-themed shooter. You read that right, a meat-themed multiplayer game. And believe it or not, it’s not the only one! Somehow, a couple of these are popped up around the same time. Great minds and all that, I guess?
Now, despite my veritable lack of interest in most shooters, meat or otherwise, this one has stayed on my radar for a handful of reasons – namely, the puns, the third-person perspective (I am hot rotten garbage at FPS games, but in third person I can be serviceable), and the studio itself. One More Game’s last gaming venture, Spellcraft, was a very interesting take on a hero focused tactical 1v1 game, though its lukewarm reception wasn’t enough to sustain it long-term. Also, the team’s made up of former developers of games like Warcraft, Diablo, and Guild Wars. I even had the opportunity to interview One More Games co-founder Jamie Winsor at the time, so checking out the group’s next game was always on my to-do list.
Looking down from the top, I can best describe SWAPMEAT as a co-op, roguelite game. That puts it in the same genre space as games like Ember Knights, Rabbit and Steel, Hades, and even PEAK if you squint a little. That is, you (and up to three friends or strangers) start a run with a bare minimum set of gear, and then you progress through constantly increasing tiers of difficulty while upgrading, leveling, and collecting loot. Whether you complete the run successfully or not, you’ll earn XP or some other currency to unlock additional or better starting equipment and abilities, making your future runs easier. Or maybe you’ll just find new cosmetics that make you look cooler while playing.
The unusual element here is that SWAPMEAT exists in a world of meat. Your character is a mushy meat blob. The environments are giant slabs of meat or meat by-products. Even the enemies are meat monsters or bugs. I suppose if you’ve got a planet made of meat, you can expect to find bugs everywhere too.
After a nice quick series of old-school newspaper headlines flashing across the screen, the game naturally begins a tutorial. It’s extremely brief, but it does introduce the lobby and is really great at reinforcing the jovial and silly nature of the game. The world gives me a lot of Fallout, post-apocalyptic vibes. I really, really dig it. There are even a bunch of screens with green text on a black background that promote that old-school terminal look.
The game jumps right into the gameplay too with that short tutorial. There’s no character builder, but I’d guess that’s due to the way the combat actually works. You can think of your gear as your weapon and then some. You have a head slot, body slot, and legs slot, each of which will be tied to a skill. If you pick up a bug head while you’re out roaming, it might give you a sticky poison spray skill. If you then swap it out for a meaty eyeball, then you might instead get an ability to summon some meaty eyeball drones.
As I said, the game’s combat is basically shootymans, so while you’ll pick up some abilities that are melee and you always have your right click to slap the foes with your spatula, you’re primarily pointing and shooting. You have only a few abilities to contend with, so there’s not a full on dance across the keyboard. Instead, you’ve got three abilities, with your normal shot, sprint, and spatula available to be modified through leveling or collected loot.
As in most roguelites, here players are making runs through a series of levels. In SWAPMEAT, a run consists of only two planets (levels) followed by a boss fight. You begin with a very basic meat suit that doesn’t even have any special abilities, but you’re very quickly able to start gearing up. Occasionally, you’ll find loot crates or terminals, but mostly you’ll be grabbing body parts off of enemies you just ‘ploded.
On each planet, you have a primary objective as well as some secondary objectives. In my playthroughs, this involved following the target on the overhead compass to a location with a bunch of blobs that had to be blown up. After going through a series of three or four of these, I found my gameloop culminated in harvesting some meat mines by calling down a ship. This began a point defense to make sure the baddies didn’t blow up my harvesters. After the ship was done gathering, I jumped into a shuttle pod and proceeded to the next planet.
Believe it or not, one of the things I really enjoy about the format of SWAPMEAT is that there is a timer constantly counting down from 10 minutes when you start a level. The best part is that this timer isn’t a hard limit; instead, it’s the time before some big baddies will appear to make your life more difficult. However, if you’re able to complete objects before the timer runs out, you’ll actually be granted more time, so there’s a bit of rush to going through the levels without it getting to the point of full failure just because you were playing a bit slow. I kind of love that.
Anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely abhor a game with runs that just go on way too long. In SWAPMEAT, even though a full run takes me over 20 minutes, I never feel as if it’s dragging on. In fact, I didn’t even look at the time. I just kept playing. The constant push toward the next objective and the ever-increasing threat of more and more baddies keeps the pressure on and my attention focused on what I’m going to do next.
Also despite how gross everything is – from the giant intestines laying all over the planet to the exploding monsters (and myself) – the feeling I get while playing is just extremely playful. It’s silly and playful. It’s one of those aesthetics that is so over-the-top ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh while experiencing it. The studio’s overzealous and oftentimes extremely ridiculous meat-based puns haven’t (yet) gotten tiresome but instead are still amusing me. I can see a bunch of gamers rolling their eyes at the absurdity of it all, but the team at One More Game leans into the memes and references throughout the game extremely hard. So, you know, just roll with it.
There are leaderboards, cosmetics, and a plenty of ways to customize your combat style. SWAPMEAT is a lot of fun to play solo, but if you can get a few friends together and really sit down with it for a few runs, I think you’ll have an excellent time.
SWAPMEAT just fully launched on Steam last week and is currently under 10 bucks thanks to the Steam summer sale.
