Beebom Score
Before you go ahead and read the intro of this review, I bet you’ve got the iconic ‘Dumb Ways to Die‘ song playing in your mind after reading the title of the game. Well, for that, you’re welcome. Now picture those tiny jelly-bean people handed a nail gun, zero construction training, some odd planks, and a half-finished tower to climb. That’s when you’ve got this game called Dumb Ways to Build, which is quite a refreshing co-op physics outing from PlaySide Studios.
So as usual, I went in expecting a throwaway party title to mess around with and instead came out having launched my friends over walls on purpose, apologised, and then did it again. While things may seem “dumb” on the surface, it’s a lot smarter than the cartoon beans let on, which is exactly what you need to know to see where the game holds up and if it’s worth playing.
So read on our Dumb Ways to Build review to judge whether this could be your next weekend party title to play with your friends or not.
Nailed It, Almost…
The objective in Dumb Ways to Build is quite simple, or if I may say ‘downright dumb.’ You’ve got to reach somewhere high and dangerous, and the game just refuses to show you how to get there. Your only answer is a nail gun, planks, crates, and anything at all you can find to build a structure. While the Fortnite fanatic in me wanted to crank 90s, the game’s physics system is where the game gets quite tricky.
To begin with, I grabbed planks and crates and stapled them into ramps, bridges, and wobbly staircases, and the first time one actually held my weight, I felt like Bob the Builder. If you build a platform or place an item wrong, a hammer pops pinned objects loose.
There are several tools that Dumb Ways to Build gives you to play with, and all of that contributes to how quickly you reach the main objective that’s high up a tower. For instance, a plunger gun yanks stuff towards you, and there’s even a grappling hook that gets you across gaps like Batman; however, these items run out of uses faster than you’d like.
What got me hooked is that there’s never one set path or solution to reach the objective. You can pin a plank as a ramp or hurl a friend over the wall and figure out the rest later. But that’s not all – dying also comes as part and parcel of the toolkit as well. Your bean turns into a balloon that your crew can grab and revive, but if it pops first, the squad loses a shared life, and you respawn at the last port-a-potty checkpoint. Yep, the ones you also see in Fortnite.
Every job also hides secret challenges, and the Master Builder version of the game brings the level back meaner. The physics in the game, as I mentioned earlier, are consistent enough that whenever a build collapsed, I couldn’t blame the game (RIP my keyboard). It was always my fault, which really stung, but I kept coming back anyway.
Too Many Builders Spoil the Scaffold
If you’re thinking Dumb Ways to Build is solely a co-op party game, you’re mistaken; it actually wears a solo game’s hat – at least that’s how I played it most of the time. You can squad up with up to three friends online (with an option to also host 8-player lobbies), and play with them with crossplay and proximity chat enabled, which in turn assures absolute chaos.
Especially when I used proximity chat in a friend’s lobby, and my passionate teammate was yelling “hold it, hold it right there!” from three floors up, I could hear exactly how doomed I was and cursed my building skills. Mind you, I got some serious building chops in Fortnite, but where physics overpowers structural design, physics wins.
In Dumb Ways to Build, nobody can hold a plank and nail it down at the same time, so jobs split up naturally. Someone steadies, someone fastens, someone hunts for materials. Bodies are solid too, which means one careless sprint can send a friend off a ledge, and I’ve had my share of such encounters quite a few times.
Solo mode exists in the game as well, but I’d call it a dare at most. You can freeze an object mid-air for a few seconds to nail it up, but you can’t pass things to anyone, and dying skips the balloon revive method. There’s also no matchmaking, so if your mates are busy, you end up recruiting strangers on Discord like a creep. Nevertheless, choose your crew carefully.
Performance: Sturdy Frames but Shaky Foundations
When it comes to performance, Dumb Ways to Build is a rather light game to install, which only demands around 6 GB of space on your SSD, and the game’s physics engine is the real star. Nails go where I aim, stacks behave as they should, and when a build falls apart, it feels earned rather than glitchy. That consistency is the whole reason that experimenting in Dumb Ways to Build never gets old.
My Setup:
CPU: Intel i7 14700K 3.40 GHz
CPU Cooler: CORSAIR H150 RGB 360mm
Motherboard: MSI Z790 Pro Wifi
GPU: Nvidia RTX 5080 Founder’s Edition 16 GB
RAM: Crucial (2x16GB) 5200MHz DDR5
SSD: Kingston 3 TB NVMe SSD
Monitor: 1440p @ 160Hz
However, it does come with its own caveats. During my gameplay, props snagged on scenery now and then, and I experienced occasional hiccups on a bad online session. When four people share one physics world, a dodgy connection hurts more than usual, so sort yours out before a big build.
Verdict: A Wobbly Title That Struggles with Skill Ceiling
Even though Dumb Ways to Build is funny, clever, and gives proper laughs with the right crew, its party co-op game label fools you more often than you realize, since there’s a real skill ceiling required to play this game. Casual players who just want to muck about will struggle to even get past the first tower, and that’s just the beginning of it.
The game’s launch only had three jobs, and some players even cleared them all in two hours, while it took me around six hours to do them all. Ever since then, the devs have been dumping more content to gauge players on it, with a Beach Breach Crisis Job, harder variants, and more cosmetic items.
Still, if you’re looking for a next physics title to play with your friends, Dumb Ways to Build might just be worth a try. However, if you’re expecting a deep campaign or aiming to master it in a weekend, I’d keep my hopes more realistic than ambitious for this one.
Ishan Adhikary
