Developed by Couch in the Woods Interactive, GRAVIATORS is a fast-paced team arena game set in space. Compete against or with friends and AI in these pinball-like arenas using space pods equipped with special gravity and shield abilities.

Right off the bat, I will say GRAVIATORS is a lot better with a controller, but it’s completely playable with either. I had a better experience with a controller as it requires you to be moving almost the whole time, and this also helped me with aiming my shots more precisely – when I got the opportunity to shoot that is.

There are three different modes/arenas to choose from, two of which are PVP-based. One is Planetary Arena – a pong-style arena with a back-and-forth playstyle, where your objective here is to knock out the five tiles on the opposite side. The other is Classic Arena. It’s the same objective with five tiles, but this, time you can fly around the whole arena freely, and each team has a circle goal to protect that can get attacked from any angle. Each tile knocked out opens a gap to score a goal, and having more tiles taken out before scoring nets you more points.

The arenas aren’t all that big, so things can get quite chaotic, and it felt like I was battling with my own team as much as the enemy team, especially with AI teammates. I found that most of the time they got in the way more than helped, sometimes even shooting the ball backwards and scoring an own goal. I couldn’t tell if the AI was aiming shots or not. It was almost like the AI saw a ball and nothing else, leading to frustrating gameplay at times.

Luckily, you don’t have to play with AI all the time. You can grab some friends online or on the couch for some co-op and versus. This works pretty well if you can keep track of your space pod with everything going on, but if versing your friends or AI isn’t your thing, there is the 3rd mode; Meteor Shower.

Here, you use similar mechanics to the other modes to aim the ball and protect your tiles by destroying waves of meteors that progressively get harder. You can play this mode solo or with a friend, and playing mostly solo, I preferred this mode as it wasn’t as chaotic.

GRAVIATORS boasts a pretty simple art style with a space theme, and arenas lit up by a neon glow, most of which looks pretty clean. A strange design choice, in my opinion, was to include low-res 3D models of the space pods, and this seemed a little out of place as you only see the pods from the top down when playing. They also didn’t appear to be as clean as the rest of the presentation of the game.

Naturally, with space and neon lights in mind, you want some techno music playing as you battle it out, and that was definitely present with the few tracks playing in the background. This is accompanied by nice sound effects such as the swooshing of your space pod as you fly around after the ball, satisfying explosions, and a small crowd cheering as you score a goal.

GRAVIATORS, at first, I would initially say is almost like a top-down Rocket League, but it’s a little more chaotic with its smallish arena and ball-aggressive AI. For the most part, it is simple and can be quite fun, but can get a little frustrating trying to hit the ball where you want without your team getting in the way.

Written by: MrVibeAU