Buy Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars

Last year, Invisible Collective released Battlesloths exclusively as part of the Humble Monthly Bundle. It wasn't a large game, but it proved to be a fun game that invoked the mayhem you'd expect from an arena combat title. One year later, the group got some backing from up-and-coming Rooster Teeth Games and was able to expand on the concept with the sequel, Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars.

There is a silly premise afoot here. In the year 2024, mankind has gone extinct. In the timespan of a year, sloths have evolved to the point where they can use weapons. They also have an affinity for pizza and will do anything to get a slice, including murder one another. Though story isn't that important in games like this, the title sets up everything in a slick animated video, so it gets bonus points for going that far as opposed to just coming up with a strange conceit and calling it a day.

As for the core gameplay, you're set up in one of multiple arenas, and you utilize twin-stick shooter mechanics. Your weapons have a wide range, including light sabers, machine guns, rocket launchers and swords, with everything but the guns having limited ammo. No matter what, you'll always start with a pistol, so you won't go into the field defenseless. One hit is all it takes to kill someone, and it takes a few seconds before they respawn to continue the fight. You have some defensive maneuvers in your arsenal, like a dodge roll and a hoverboard to zip around the level, so you aren't dependent on the stage walls for your survival.

The game has four different modes in which to unleash mayhem, including a standard deathmatch with either a life goal or a time limit attached. Last Sloth Standing is your basic stock match, where you must deplete other players' stock of lives before they do the same to you. Slice Hunt is much more involved, as every sloth you kill drops a pizza slice, and your goal is to return the required number of pizza slices to your base. Meanwhile, Golden Slice has a lower required goal, but only one slice drops at a time, so it's a race to snag it and bring it home the minute it spawns.

Battlesloths 2025 doesn't really introduce anything new to the genre, save for the top-down perspective and focus on bringing back an item as opposed to purely going for kills. It retains all of the things that people love about battle arena titles. Despite being sloths, they move around rather quickly on the field, and the action feels frantic. You have the option to slow things down if you want to be more tactical, so the game does a good job of catering to both types of gamers. The weapon variety is appreciated, and the hazards in each stage are distinct enough to keep people on their toes. Best of all, each match feels rather fresh, so even though the level variety isn't as diverse as other similar titles, boredom rarely sets in.

The game also provides some incentive for players in the form of hats. There are roughly 700 of them currently in the game, and they range from a normal baseball cap to silly animal heads. There's also lots of Rooster Teeth-inspired headgear, so anything associated with ScrewAttack! or Achievement Hunter is available here, on-air personalities included. The game follows the current trend of unlocking them all via loot boxes, so randomization is very high, and it could have been tedious to do this since you only unlock one box at a time. However, you're always earning coins, sometimes two or three at a time, depending on your prowess on the field. Since each box only costs one coin, you can find yourself in a buying frenzy if you forget about the feature for a bit.

While the game has online play, there's no one actually playing online. We've tried numerous times during the review period, but it seems that despite the clamoring for online play in other games like this, there's no one willing to participate in a title that offers it up. The good news is that the game supports bots for offline play, so people can still enjoy the title and grind for hats before their next local multiplayer bout.

Even with the lack of an online community, players will be relieved to find that the developers are still cranking out new content for the game at a good pace. Thus far, that has included new hats and levels, but the bigger addition for solo players is a Challenge mode. It starts off with the basics, so it acts like a tutorial at first, but it doesn't take long before some real challenges come in, like being able to take out X number of enemies in a short period of time. Those challenges have three difficulty levels each, and since that means more coins, it gives players an incentive to check them all out.

The presentation is simple but done well. The graphics follow the pixel art trend that's popular among most indie titles, so they're intentionally jagged but the movement is smooth as butter. Loads of effects hit the screen, and it never feels like you're losing control of what's going on, since the guns are very accurate. On the sound side, the score and sound effects are very well done, and the small "eep" uttered when you run out of ammo is cute.

Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars is a highly enjoyable battle arena game. It is both fast and intuitive while keeping a good pace, so matches don't drag on longer than they should. The loads of cosmetic unlocks will keep players busy for a while, and if the patching done so far is any indication, there's still more good stuff to come. It's a shame there's no one online to play with, but for anyone who's looking for another local multiplayer versus game, Battlesloths 2025 fits the bill nicely.

Score: 8.5/10