We spoke with Phillip Johnson, lead developer, programmer and creative director of Battlesloths at SxSW 2016.
The Battlesloths vibe radiates out of the character selection screen, where you dress your sloths in horse heads and Jason masks as a 90’s-rad color palette bounces to the music. Playing Battlesloths—previously released for Humble Bundle and currently up for consideration on Steam Greenlight—will put you back in the Bomberman mindset: that particular, claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in a small box with three other anarchic murderers. Only this time, they’re sloths.
Battlesloths began at a Game Jam, as the developers of Invisible Collective crunched to produce a simple game in a matter of hours. The game still bears the marks of that improvisational development, its design emerging from a “Yes, And…” brainstorm that produced two incredibly important questions: “Can we have pizza?” And “Can we have sloths?” Mission accomplished.
‘Battlesloths’ Trailer
Even before getting to the gameplay, there’s a certain earnest appeal to the Battlesloths aesthetic. The pitch is just silly enough to sound as if it were orchestrated by potato chip executives trapped in 1995 and desperate for an edgy, skateboarding animal mascot. But once you see Battlesloths in motion nothing about it feels calculated. Instead it seems to emerge from a genuine enthusiasm for the laid-back ‘tudes of 90s cartoon characters. There’s more of the Ninja Turtles than Bradypodidae in these guys.
The gameplay is similarly 80s and 90s inflected. If Battlesloths were a wine, you’d be sniffing out hints of Battletoads, Bomberman and the multiplayer mode of Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s tricky, but a handful of other games in the current console generation have sublimated those feelings, with games like Towerfall: Ascension featuring multiplayer modes more savage, kinetic and pixel-choked than anything the last century could produce. Battlesloths follows in that hyper-90s tradition.
“I was really into Hotline Miami and Towerfall,” Johnson said. “I wanted it to stay lethal.”
That means one hit kills. Indeed, Battlesloths is very lethal, especially when you factor into the piles of weaponry—AK-47s, laser swords, rocket launchers, shotguns, and laser beams—choking the tight arenas. You’ll never feel as if one player has snatched up all the good weapons playing Battlesloths .
If the digital gun convention and the high kill count weren’t enough, Battlesloths also features hoverboards that can shoot your sloth halfway across an arena in a skidding arc. Johnson takes evident joy in just how little the concept seems to have been debated or considered in advance. “It’s all sloths riding hoverboards fighting for pizza,” he said, before recalling that the hoverboards had once been skateboards.
“This isn’t really a skateboard, more of a hoverboard,” Johnson says, describing the moment of game design revelation, “and then the top of my head blew off.”
“You can hoverboard with the left trigger,” he shouts across me to two teens who look like they just skateboarded off Santa Monica Pier. A long, appreciative “whoooaaaa” returns. Johnson sure loves those hoverboards.
His enthusiasm comes across in every second of Battlesloths. I tried out two game modes and had trouble not shoving and swearing at the preteens huddled around the screen with me. Both modes had players fighting over pizza, slices scattering like Sonics’ rings after you kill someone. The other mode featured a big countdown clock in the center, forcing players to constantly return to the killing floor and reset the bomb to prevent a wave of nuclear pizza devastation.
There aren’t enough opportunities for multiplayer experiences that can be shared on a couch. Even rarer to dodge the split-screen and exist, with your friends (now enemies) in a world defined entirely by the bounds of your screen. While Battlesloths was previously available on Humble Bundle, it’d be a real shame if it didn’t spread further. So get on over to the Battlesloth Steam Greenlight page, vote, and make all your rocket launcher pizza explosion fantasies come true.
