Since this annoying lockdown I’ve been pretty glad that I talked myself into buying a Switch. Our house doesn’t have a lot of hiding space away from the rest of the family so grabbing my Nintendo console and hiding in the bathroom or bedroom means I still get time to enjoy my favourite passtime.
Alternatively, I’m finding family games where we can play together. One of the games I picked up recently was Overcooked and I’ve been looking for similar titles to play since then. That’s why I was pleased to see Moving Out dropping on to my lap (in a purely digital sense) as it contains the same sort of maniacal physics based fun as Team 17’s cooking game but this time transported to a house removal firm.
Now I’ll start by prefacing the rest of my review with a disclaimer; Moving Out is not Overcooked, even if they do share a publisher, and once you get into the game it feels quite different, but it does use some of the same ideas, especially when it comes to multiplayer.
The general idea is to drive to a house, remove the furniture marked for removal and take it to the truck waiting outside, all within a time limit. Sounds simple, right? L shaped sofas, tight doorways and unfortunately placed swimming pools say otherwise! In single player this is a bit overwhelming and the time limits feel almost impossible to beat on some of the later houses. Moving Out is a game built for multiplayer and for people working together to solve the issue (which usually involves plenty of swearing). While the game only supports local multiplayer at the current time, it would be even better to share the fun with friends who, for obvious reasons, can’t come around right now, it’s something that I can play sat on the couch with the family instead and it’s a perfect alternative to hiding away on my own.
Moving Out is certainly eye catching. It’s bright and colourful in all the right places and you can tell the developers have a sense of humour, they’ve included a lot of sight gags as well as some of the more traditional fart gags (high brow this is not!) Although some of the set pieces can be quite small to fit the whole house on the screen, I never found that any detail was lost when playing docked. Handheld there were a few times I had to squint but mostly the camera does a good job where it needs to.
While I won’t be moving outside of my own house for the foreseeable future, at least I can have some fun with Moving Out on Switch with my family and an excuse to game together in the meantime.
Moving Out
Pros
- Great fun in couch multiplayer
- Colourful world with lots of humour
- Physics puzzles work well
- Interesting later game ,mechanics
Cons
- More tricky in single player
- No online co-op
