QWOP on steroids is possibly the best descriptor I’ve read for Drink More Glurp. I completely agree. This turn based party athletics game is a mixture of QWOP, Ragdoll Runners and YouTube Product Placement send ups rolled into one. Designed to be wonky in physics on purpose but ever changing, Drink More Glurp could also be called Get More Mad.
You can play with up to 20 people locally but everyone takes turns anyway as you dress up your rubbery cartoon character in colours and gear before you set off on a rollercoaster of various sports to complete for the quickest time, longest distance, most points or most accurate shot in them. Your character will have two arms that you can rotate around using your analogue sticks to make yourself run forward like giant wheels. You can grab using these arms too using the shoulder buttons and if you flick the analogue sticks from one side to another you can fling your character in that direction. It is a piss poor attempt to add a jump that is both clunky and frustratingly inaccurate but it adds to the general chaos. Most of the trouble with the movement comes from the games need to make you jump and climb over all kinds of things so having it purposely wonky is what is meant to bring the hijinx.
There are about 15 base events that I’ve uncovered during my playtime and they mostly mimic real-life Olympic events. Running, hurdles, throwing, downhill, shooting, basketball – they all initially seem relatively simple on the surface. Simple until you realise that Drink More Glurps trump card is in its sponsored variants that completely change your experience from one version of the same event to the next. These come on top of variants of obstacle courses and arenas too.
Each sponsor changes that event. One might give you floppy arms so you can’t jump properly, another may shorten them to a tiny dino arm which changes the physics entirely. Others will see you on rockets blasting around or jetpacks or have weightless gravity so everything is highly exaggerated. Then others bloat your change your character rather than the conditions or physics. You never know quite what you are going to get and mashups can make even the simplest running event turn into chaos.
Drink More Glurp is ten times better with friends than alone. When alone you are competing against your own high scores but when others are involved – it is for the medals! You’ll laugh at and with each other as you accidentally fire your throw backwards or pathetically jump literally 0.1 meters forward. Special shoutout for the obstacle courses where you have to cross things on platforms like a neon Takeshi’s Castle. Failing that immediately can be laugh out loud soul-destroying.
So far, so good – but the final score is a seven out of time for the time being. Taking turns is fine but the game screams for some multiplayer side by side action. It isn’t as if the screen is being fully used all the time so split-screen could have been implemented. Some of the controls around jumping and aiming are just the wrong side of chaotic for my liking. A bit like how Gang Beasts moves from funny to frustrating if you try to actually learn it properly. The beauty is in not having a clue and blindly attacking it. There are also some events that are either too hard or too long with nothing really happening. There is a removal van style event which after months no one I have played with has ever scored more than a single point on and that was rare. Whereas the downhill event often has 15 seconds of running downhill with nothing and then a jump over a block. It just needed a little tightening up across the board to make it a truly great party experience.
I suspect Drink more Glurp will get more love from me over time. I feel like the initial impression is superb and then you hit a bit of a lull with it as you try to conquer its absolutely scream worthy physics. Add in a few drinks and some mates that enjoy watching you fail though, and this gets bumped up a bit on the score charts.
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