Moving Out 2 Review – The Best Kind of Chaos

8.0 TOTAL SCORE

Moving Out 2 Review

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Moving Out 2 is everything a good sequel should be: it retains the addictive slap-stick charm of Team 17's initial idea whilst augmenting it with inventive new puzzles and wonderfully designed levels. The result is a fantastic party game that extends well beyond the confines of the four walls of the last game -- even if you're still just moving objects from one area to the next. Naturally, that simple premise doesn't translate well to a single-player experience. This is a multiplayer game through and through, and such a game is always going to be best played in a couch co-op setting.

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Score 8

PROS

• The game is bursting with new ideas that make the first game pale in comparison.
• The simplest concepts are emboldened with clever puzzles and amazing-level design.
• Unpredictability makes for plenty of replay value.
• Overall, this is some of the most hysterical co-op fun that can be had on PC.

CONS

• The PC version is not the best option for local play.
• There were a couple of physics glitches that slowed down the pace here and there.
• The Dad jokes wear a bit thin after a while, and the story feels redundant.

Moving Out channels the same frantic co-op fun that caught the wind following the emergence of Overcooked and Storage Inc. The sequel builds on the original’s ability to take on one of life’s most unpleasant tasks, and somehow translate it into an hilarious few hours.

But considering the premise is pretty much the same, does it offer enough to still feel fresh? Functioning best as a local co-op game, how does this premise gel with gaming’s least co-op-friendly platform? Here’s our review of Moving Out 2 on PC.

Handle with Flair

Team 17 has always had an appetite for the absurd, but the company has rebranded significantly since the inception of Worms.

They’re a studio that’s taken full advantage of the indie game boom to provide clever little games that tap into the much-neglected market of families in the wake of the Wii. Naturally, their games have become a huge hit on the Switch.

That doesn’t mean the company has abandoned its PC routes, though, and Moving Out 2 is yet another example of their games being widely accessible across all platforms.

This is, unequivocally, a multiplayer game, if there ever was such a delineation; like the previous title, Moving Out 2’s fun is fundamentally mediated by the exultations—or, invariably, chastisements—of the friend or family member playing with you.

The game revolves around haphazardly moving furniture into a moving truck to a timer—a simple task emboldened by the joy of physics, player ineptitude, and leaving the home you’re tasked with moving out of uninhabitable for the next owner.

To be assured of a job well done, you and your partners need only to throw (quite literally) each valuable into the designated moving truck. Reaching that end goal, no matter how ridiculously you achieve it, is up to you, and that’s the game’s biggest appeal.

Unlike Overcooked, the hilarity never ventures into genuine stress with Moving Out 2. This is a more dynamic free-for-all, but what it loses in methodical strategy and organization, it makes up for in laughs.

The controls feel tight enough to execute precise movements, but fluid enough to embrace the bouncy, cartoonish feeling Team 17’s games are known for.

The move set is straightforward: you’ve got a basic grab, a button to illuminate the map with items to collect and to show whether they need one or two people to be carried, and a throw button; with these basic concepts comes a huge range of different ideas, however.

Pandora’s Cardboard Box

Despite its simplistic styling, the game exudes comedic flair outside of what you cause yourself. Crashing through windows for a quick shortcut or hearing glass break in boxes as you launch them into the van; the still-plugged-in wire of a TV twanging your character back: situations like these build like a pressure, which is finally expelled as a chorus of laughs when you inevitably mess up spectacularly.

That said, the dad jokes do wear a little thin after a while — I ended up just skipping through most of the dialogue as it felt a bit redundant.

I did also find the throwing mechanics to be a little inaccurate at times, but the physics overall feels very well designed.

Everything you grab and brush past has an appropriate and appealing movement to it, and I enjoyed how multilayered the physics were—it’s always appealing to see individual pool balls dance about on a table, and the way bits of paraphernalia you drop build up to form a bomb site of a building in your wake is always a laugh to see.

Where the previous game’s appeal lessened over time as it eventually felt like the same thing over and over again, the sequel generally feels like everything a successor should be.

There has to be at least double the content than was in the first game, whether that comes in the form of excellently designed new levels that extend far beyond the typical house setting, or the array of clever electric lock puzzles, sliding platforms, conveyor belts, and uses of verticality.

When you manage to pull off a trick shot by bouncing an item off a parasol and into the truck, you get a feeling of accomplishment that’s seldom expressed as traditional incentives usually wane to the thrills of farse.

Given the wealth of different environmental aids you can use to accomplish your task, I can see players taking things more seriously in the future to rank on the leaderboards, and it’s cool to see that there’s more scope for some serious gamer skills which wasn’t really there in the first game.

Player 2 and I were also continually surprised at how challenging things could be. As you progress into the later levels, the game wholeheartedly comes into its own; It’s clear that Team 17 had an intention to wow with every stage, as while the early levels lull you into a false sense of security with what is essentially just more of the same, the later levels are pure, unadulterated whimsy.

Moving Out 2 ventures much further into the surreal, and as you’ll drive your truck from location to location, literally spanning different dimensions, the environments end up looking more akin to those in Super Mario Odyssey than they do in Moving Out 1.

Maybe the Real Treasure Was the Mistakes We Made along the Way…

Taken at face value, there isn’t anything particularly innovative about Moving Out 2. These are the same cutesy top-down graphics we’ve seen time and time again and the same jokes about farts that somehow never cease to produce a chuckle. Nevertheless, the developers have made substantial improvements within the game’s own bubble to make for a far more clever game than the first one was.

Of course, the challenge increases simultaneously with the fun as more players join the fray; if you can get together a group of three or four friends, Moving Out 2 becomes total chaos in the best sense.

With four players, you can, to the best of your ability at least, start to form hopeful strategies on the fly. “You two go upstairs, and we’ll tackle the first floor” Sounds sensible enough, but when both groups are trying to squeeze a sofa and a bed through the same doorway, it all brilliantly goes to pot.

Moving Out 1’s greatest strength was its unpredictability—you could take straight-forward levels with a basic end goal and make them endlessly fun due to how much variability was involved between how you and your friends would execute your mission. This is still the overriding selling point of Moving Out 2, but the whole thing is far more inventive.

Sometimes, We Just Need a Friend

Playing Moving Out 2 alone is an entirely different experience, and you quickly come to learn that playing with friends locally isn’t only the best part of this game but exists as its entire being. If you play alone, not only is the crucial component of a local social setting missing, but the tasks themselves feel excruciatingly dull.

Walking alone into a house, hitting the Y button, and observing dozens of items that need to be individually lugged into the truck is met with a sigh—the same sigh you might expel if you had the task of moving house in real life ahead of you.

It’s akin to hopping around GM Construct in Gary’s Mod solo or playing Jenga by yourself—the entire soul is ripped out of the experience because, ultimately, that soul is you and your friends and family.

Of course, Team 17 will be very aware of this, and that’s why they’ve baked in all possible modalities of play: with the Steam version, you’ve got both online and local co-op, remote play, and cross-play.

However, I’d wager you’ll have an experience not too distant from the single-player one should you play online without a mic: so much of actually strategizing in Moving Out 2 revolves around negotiating through verbal communication, and without it, everything falls flat.

The online multiplayer features are nice to have, but they’re never going to beat local co-op, and the PC can’t compete with something like the Switch in that department.

Personally, I have my PC hooked up to a TV screen and mostly play with a controller, so I very much had a console experience with the game.

Most setups aren’t going to be conducive to a couch co-op setting, though, so unless you’ll have a group of friends to play with online, I’d think carefully about whether you want to buy the game for PC or another platform.

The Verdict

Score 8.0

It’ll be difficult for anyone to not intrinsically enjoy the silliness of Moving Out 2. Once again, Team 17 has taken a simple premise and added enough substance to quench your appetite for silliness that you’ll keep coming back for more.

It charmingly swerves the annoyance of failure when your comrade beside you can barely keep it together, and the wealth of inventive level designs and new, on-the-fly puzzles really squeeze the most out of the concept.

With dozens of levels to blast through with your friends, this is an excellent game to whip out at a party amongst the drinks and board games, and for a night’s worth of fun every now and then, Moving Out 2 won’t disappoint.

Its downfall is almost entirely situational; the PC platform just doesn’t lend itself to this sort of gameplay, and unless you have your PC set up at a TV like me and have an abundance of old Xbox 360 controllers lying about, I’d suggest getting the game for a console.

This is simple fun at its best, so be sure to connect with people on that most basic level to enjoy it to the fullest.

Pros

• The game is bursting with new ideas that make the first game pale in comparison.
• The simplest concepts are emboldened with clever puzzles and amazing-level design.
• Unpredictability makes for plenty of replay value.
• Overall, this is some of the most hysterical co-op fun that can be had on PC.

Cons

• The PC version is not the best option for local play.
• There were a couple of physics glitches that slowed down the pace here and there.
• The Dad jokes wear a bit thin after a while, and the story feels redundant.

Alternatives to Moving Out 2

• Overcooked 1 & 2
• Storage Inc.
• Trash Patrol
• It Takes Two
• Good Job
• Snipper Clips
• Tools Up!

Moving Out 2 Review: FAQs

Play Log

Linden spent eight hours with Moving Out 2–enough time to complete the main story mode and test out each modality of play to see how the game functioned with more or fewer players.

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Linden Garcia

Linden is perhaps the only member of staff at Indie Game Culture that yearns for the Dreamcast era of gaming. Which is perhaps why he prefers playing Indies with pixel graphics and rough-and-ready polygons than the AAA offerings of today.

His one true love in the indie space is the puzzle genre, and outside of gaming, you'll often find him sculpting himself in the gym.

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