Regular Human Basketball (Review)

Regular Human Basketball is a wacky Multiplayer party game about gargantuan robots playing basketball for 2-10 players (I'm not entirely sure how that works), from the developers who made Crawl. Developed and published by Powerhoof. With no real context as to why people are controlling massive robots to play basketball, I'm left with the conclusion that humanity was taken over by sentient talking robots and the remaining humans are forced to play basketball against their will for entertainment purposes in exchange for their lives... or maybe it's just the future of basketball, who really knows. One thing I can tell you for sure, is that this game is worth playing if you're trying to pass the time or just want to have a stupid good time.

Gameplay wise it's very similar to Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, but with giant robots and basketballs. The goal is to shoot or dunk the ball into the hoop (like regular "human" basketball) the only catch is that you have to do it by controlling titanic juggernauts disguised as humans. Inside your robot is a layout of buttons used to control its limbs and gadgets, yellow buttons control the legs, red buttons turn on and off and rotate the large magnet, and finally blue buttons turn on and off and direct the booster rockets. The gimmick here is that you are a bunch of little oddly shaped humanoid things that have to run around the inside of your massive bots interacting with one button at a time, once a button is pressed it stays on until you press it again. This makes for hilarious frantic scrambles to adjust things before your robots decide they don't know how to walk anymore and proceed to slam into each other and the ground, it plays out less like basketball and more like a drunken bar fight where everyone is just body slamming and bashing the crap out of each other with giant magnets. So in other words, it's pretty damn entertaining. (if you don't mind feeling like you're not in control half of the time.)

Sabotage plays a pretty big part in every match, with the ability to jump into and screw around with your opponents robot. If you feel like it and really put in the effort, you could even score using your opponents bot. Everything is commented on by robot sports announcers, saying cheesy things that you would expect robots to say if they were trying to pass as humans, which they are. (and they're doing a pretty swell job at it if I do say so myself) I myself thought it was pretty funny, but I could see it annoying some players, if it does get obnoxious you can mute it in the settings. There's a small variety of Stages (six to be exact) and they're all decently sized, though they will probably get old after some time, but what do you expect when you see a $4.99 price-tag. The art is very minimalistic and the animations are polished and surprisingly stylish for a party game of its size. The biggest issue I could see people complaining about (myself included) is the lack of bots/CPU, it's kind of essential at this point to have bots as an available option, as nearly every multiplayer party game does. Besides that I found no other major problems.

Regular Human Basketball is a game I would put in the same vein as Stick Fight: The Game, in that it's very entertaining as a party game and is also a great time waster. Despite the fact that at the moment there's no option to play with CPUs/bots, the concept of controlling huge robots to play basketball is hilarious and amusing, and although the gameplay is simple and straightforward with only a small amount of variety it's still great fun. Regular Human Basketball is available for $4.99 on Pc/Steam and Itch.io.