Moving Out 2 PS4 Review – A little over three years and one global pandemic have passed since the first Moving Out released on PS4. With this new instalment comes a great deal of the same thing that the first game offered: intentionally clumsy mechanics and goofy antics. While I do say this game can be a fun social excursion, I cannot say that it’s a universally enjoyable one.
Moving Out 2 Review (PS4) – A Fun Co-op Romp That’s Not Meant For Everyone
The humor used the entire game is a fun combination of dad jokes and contradictory one-liners, like “Make sure to lift with your spine, not your knees, by William Shakespeare,” and I live for it. There’s also a great deal of humor around how this team does not do a good job at what they do.
In fact, the team goes by the name “Furniture Arrangement Relocation Technician.” The acronym itself is a recurring joke. At no point does this game take itself seriously, which makes for fun, contradictory goofs to handling the belongings of complete strangers.
The selling point to games like this is the challenge between both the maps and reigning in the controls. First, the controls follow your inputs exactly. However, the character doesn’t share the same rigid movement. Instead, your character’s noodle arms constantly wiggle-waggle with every action you take.
Break A Few Windows To Get The Job Done
These extra motions create a unique level of challenge to a game like this, one that, if you wish to earn all rewards, demands that you master the physics of your character’s extra motions. Quite honestly, when you get the feel for it, very few things reach that same level of instant gratification.
Again, controlling your character is not necessarily hard, but it’s also not easy to get your character to slide a bed through a house when you also have to contend with one-way doors and oddly-shaped pathways. This is by design. It’s a challenge programmed into the controls.
To make things more interesting, the game offers you unorthodox methods to clearing out houses. For instance, breaking windows is not only allowed, it’s encouraged. Another tactic is more relative but very much on-brand for Moving Out 2. When you drop a smaller item onto an umbrella, the item will bounce off and land in the truck.
Throwing small items is also encouraged, even fragile ones. There are consequences to throwing fragile ones, naturally, but if the fragile items land in the truck, then they do not break.
Demand Doesn’t Match Reward
Where the controls grow cumbersome, however, starts in two places. The easiest place to explain is the amount of levels you use these controls in. As you complete levels, you naturally unlock more challenging ones. The longer you play, the easier you command your noodle arms in new environments. Still, the map difficulty bumps up rather quickly, which asks you to truly command the game’s mechanics.
The second cumbersome place is me playing my own broken record: I’m awful at puzzles. In this case, I enjoy these puzzles, but the time limit here places an extra burden that I personally find more smothering than motivating. For each level, you can earn either a star for a fast time or a completion time, with unique time limits for each level.
To complete these requirements, you need a certain level of foresight – in my case, I end up using hindsight. With the time limits, I’m left playing each level multiple times in order to progress. I learn, but the learning the game provides isn’t the kind that yields something satisfying. Instead of “aha” moments, they yield more “oh” moments.
If you’re good at this game, you won’t face this like I did. Equally so, I believe that the game would be more universally attractive if the game provided a non-timed game mode where people could just mess around or play the game on their own time.
Good Without Universality
In retrospect, these issues feel far less influential on the final product when you play in co-op. The fun of cooperating, messing up, and goofing around lessens the “work” aspect of the game proper, even for me. Another fantastic point to mention is that Moving Out 2 supports both local co-op and cross-play co-op. The team wants you to play with others, and the team offers multiple player bases to do so.
On that note, I want to say one more thing from a personal perspective. When I play the game, I have a decent enough time and keep playing for a while without really thinking about how long I play. That’s even when I play by myself. When I’m not playing Moving Out 2, I have to motivate myself to play it.
I say these things not as negatives for this game, but simply to show that Moving Out 2 is not a universally enjoyable experience. There is great merit that I see in the game. The tongue-in-cheek humor combined with the goofy antics built into the gameplay make for a palpable combination, and it’s executed well to boot.
Personally, it’s a game I will jump into when I get the wild hair or if my spouse wants to knock me down a peg. Apart from that, though. I won’t go back to the game very often. Again, this is not a knock on the game. It’s just not meant for me.
Moving Out 2 Gets The Job Done Well, Albeit With A Couple Broken Windows
Moving Out 2 has a wonderful charm to it. Adding a lack of good business practice makes the act of moving clients from house to house feel fun. Goofy writing matches the tone of the game, and the noodle-arm physics adds a nice layer of both challenge as well as room for “on-the-job accidents.”
Still, the puzzles themselves are not all that rewarding, and bringing in a time limit doesn’t lessen that lack of reward. A couple moves could have been made to make the game more universal without losing its charm, but that doesn’t seriously undermine the enjoyment that the dev team has deftly weaved into Moving Out 2.