Moving Out built a solid foundation with its barmy physics and multiplayer teamwork. While the original co-op moving sim had huge potential, like an empty house awaiting its owner’s belongings, a renovation was clearly in order for players to truly feel at home. Fortunately, SMG’s sequel has stepped up the Packmore property ladder, its improved level designs have combined with its existing slapstick systems to make it the envy of the neighbourhood.
The cheerful F.A.R.T.s (Furniture Arrangement Relocation Technicians) are back, undeterred by briefly losing their license. Business is better than ever, and they’re ready for you and your friends to tear up 57 new properties in a race to pack up an absentee homeowner’s infuriatingly located possessions and shatter every window standing in your way.
We return to the setting from the first game, but here Packmore is merely the suburban prelude to a multiverse full of imminent house moves. This time, you’ll be clumsily maneuvering couches through locales such as Pactropolis City, a metropolis in the clouds with an aesthetic evoking Wall-E’s clean sci-fi look. You’ll stow away a wizard’s spellbooks in the high fantasy world of Middle Folkmore – don’t worry, despite the name it’s reassuringly orc-free. And Snackmore copies a Mario Kart trademark with candified fields of tooth-rotting treats among a vast lake of melted chocolate.
The multiverse allows for significantly more memorable locations than the original game’s offices, three-bedroom houses, and sterile space station. And it’s not just the art team who goes wild, stages are littered with so many preposterously inventive challenges you’ll forget that locating furniture to lug into a van is really the most humdrum fetch quest imaginable.
These new stages present an endless stream of invention that had us hooked on their sheer variety. We always had something unexpectedly outrageous to do, whether that’s slingshotting fridges and televisions across a molten chocolate lake, loading appliances onto a train (which inexplicably isn’t named the F.A.R.T. Express), opening passages with synchronised bookcase dials, or smashing through cookie dough walls with a gobstopper.
Couch co-op games always face the same question: How much hassle can your players handle? Despite a van-ful of new ideas, just like the first game Moving Out 2 leans to caution. Time limits are reasonable, stage-specific gadgets and novelties are dropped in at a manageable pace, and the game refuses to mess you around, clearly accommodating younger players whose child labour the game is eager to entice.
No matter how much furniture clutters the stage, these stages’ layout, unique contraptions, and Looney Tunes logic is always easily understood. This is helped by how SMG avoids the random events seen in their culinary rival Overcooked!’s constantly shifting levels; Moving Out 2 makes sure the relationship between cause and effect is always crystal clear.
This can mean stages become predictable, but the game’s treacherous physics and loose character movement usually adds enough confusion and peril to compensate, even if we’d like the option to add just a dash more jeopardy. Even if players always have the hidden option of becoming an agent of chaos themselves, and start tossing your neatly packed items into the nearest swimming pool.
For more experienced players, even meeting the sterner challenge of Pro times and bonus objectives (frustratingly revealed after a stage’s first playthrough) can feel too relaxed. But the brisk pace has one major perk– we found that demanding just a bit less than your removals team’s full focus kept tensions at a sociable simmer rather than a furious frenzy.
Of course with so many new ideas, not all of them can be an instant hit. Pactropolis City’s stages where you clear away clouds with vacuum devices quickly become a tedious chore (nobody ever felt what these games lacked was fog-of-war). The new addition of one-way doors can also cause the wrong kind of frustration. But these missteps are outnumbered by brilliant moments where new ideas shine. We’ll deal with a fiddly vacuum cleaner for the joys of bouncing couches and televisions off a parasol into a waiting van.
This game lives or dies by how well it disguises how it’s just about shifting items from one place to another. If the illusion fades, players are in for a tedious awakening. Thankfully, it never runs out of ways to make one of life’s great chores exciting. The arcade cartridges scattered across the game are a special treat – dropping the faintest pretense of creating a plausible living space makes for some madcap challenges.
There’s no getting around the fact it’s a game designed to be played with friends. A bevy of options means you can play solo without significant disadvantage, but the game is at its finest assembling the teamwork, comradery, and petty squabbling of your best buds. And Moving Out 2 makes it easier than before with the essential addition of crossplay online multiplayer.
In a social setting, it’s simply an uproariously good time, especially if you follow the traditions of real-life house moves and order a takeaway for you and your friends. With or without a steaming hot pepperoni pizza, it’s hard not to mirror the infectious positivity shown by the game’s roster of 33 surreal SpongeBob SquarePants-y character designs. Its cast of toasterheads, froggy aristocrats, and the very literal sneakerheads have an endearingly goofy sense of humour, and the game’s good vibes prove hard to resist (even if some of its puns were better off left in the Christmas cracker they came from).
Other than the game’s reluctance to really push its players to their limits, its other flaw is that increased ambitions brought with them some unfortunate performance issues. There was occasional slowdown, and we almost didn’t want to collect new characters when finding them means 10 seconds loading their intro screen before going back to the overworld.
Conclusion
Moving Out 2 may not quite be your multiplayer forever home, but its good vibes and intricate challenges are going to cause many joyful whoops of celebration, cries of frustration, irreparably broken furniture, and wild accusations about how the hell a bookcase fell off the balcony. Sounds like coming home to us.
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