In the tradition of QWOP, comes a new indie game where the co-op platforming is made extra challenging by some very idiosyncratic controls.
There are a number of games that despite their otherwise high quality, have a surprisingly poor control set-up. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops attempted to implement standard first person shooter controls on the PSP, which only has one analogue stick, and while Red Dead Redemption 2 is an undisputed classic it’s also legendary for its poor aiming and mess of single button context sensitive commands, that regularly see Arthur Morgan doing just what you didn’t want.
There’s a separate category of games that have deliberately bad controls. Probably the most infamous of those is QWOP, which had you controlling different muscle groups in an athlete’s legs with separate buttons. It’s a design choice that doesn’t have to be a barrier to success, as the many fans of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy will tell you. Watching people lose their minds while attempting to scale mountains using only a sledgehammer, while trapped in a round-bottomed cauldron, actually makes for amusing Twitch streams.
And so to Biped 2. The original game came out five years ago, and featured small, cubic robots that looked a lot like the stars of Astro Bot, but controlled more like the athlete in QWOP – with each of their legs mapped to a different analogue stick. Walking involved swinging one leg, then the other. It’s a process that’s actually nowhere near as awkward as QWOP but is still monumentally tricky compared with almost any other game you can think of.
Fortunately, you can also push both sticks in the same direction, causing your robot to glide forward like a figure skater, discovering a sudden fleetness and elegance that’s literally impossible with their standard form of locomotion. Unfortunately, because of that burst of speed, you can only really use it when you’re a long way from any of the game’s multitude of fiddly platform challenges.
The sequel maintains the exact same system, and while it’s possible to make the best of it, even after a lot of practice you never get the feeling you’ve mastered it, as your bot’s drunken gait always carries an air of unpredictability. And that’s after a few hours’ play. Initially, it’s an infuriating mess of flailing legs and plunges into the cartoon abyss, jaw clenched, knuckles whitening around your controller.
That’s because Biped 2 really doesn’t hold back on its challenge, which even in its farcically entitled Easy Mode is significant. In the game’s first level following training you’ll find yourself transporting energy cores on your head, that get unstable and explode if you take too long to reach your goal. Then you have to avoid swinging, shiny wrecking balls, before having to walk across platforms that break after a few seconds of standing on them.
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After that, you have to negotiate a raft made of collapsing platforms, as it traverses a canyon with wrecking balls swinging across it from both sides, all undertaken from a fixed camera isometric view that makes it difficult to work out where those deadly pendulums are in relation to your bot. Once again, that’s the game’s second level, and as you can imagine things get a lot tougher from there.
There are puzzles that demand exacting foot placement; monorail sections where you need to continually shift tracks, while posting cubes from one side of the course into bins on the other; precarious mazes of collapsing platforms; and an ice world where you need to swing between ropes in 3D, your only succour provided by frozen sheets that also degrade a second or two after you attach to them. Then, true to form, it combines those mechanics into even more savage tests of patience.
Throughout all of this, you’re wrestling with the control system and your capacity to sustain patience against overwhelming provocation. It’s at this point it’s worth mentioning that, at heart, Biped 2 is a co-op game. While you can play the whole thing solo, taking the role of both players in the many sections where two bots are needed, you can tell most of it’s designed to be a folie à deux.
The issue is that with the random frustrations induced by its unfair controls, and their interaction with relentlessly exacting challenges, you’ll find your relationship with player two being similarly tested. Just because you managed to make it across a maze of disintegrating platforms while gun turrets shot at you from all sides, it doesn’t mean your partner will be able to. If recriminations don’t follow, it’s only because you’ve choked them down into a hard little knot in the pit of your stomach.
On the plus side, the game looks nice, is relatively cheap, and despite the fury it engenders is only around five hours long if you can get through it without rage quitting. Along the way there are numerous easy bits, like the palate cleansing straightforward-to-control hang-glider sections, where you drift through lines of coins without a care in the world.
It’s also fair to say that none of your countless deaths sets you back very far, with no limit to the number of lives you can lose by messing up, letting you repeat sections over and over again until, by some ungodly fluke, you manage to stumble your way through.
Still, if that’s anybody’s idea of a good time, we’d be surprised. Silksong’s brutal difficulty was leavened by pin sharp controls and an exquisitely designed map that made exploration a joy. Here, you’re undertaking platform levels that would be relatively hard even by normal standards, while simultaneously dealing with a randomly capricious control scheme.
It’s baffling that anyone would spend five years creating something of such stochastic cruelty, but then the world’s a big place and there are surely worse things going on elsewhere on its surface. Nevertheless, we would advise not playing this, especially with anyone you love or plan to spend time with in the long term.
Biped 2 review summary
In Short: A co-op orientated platformer, with cute robots and a deliberately awkward control set-up, that purposefully makes its tough challenge as infuriating as possible.
Pros: Shiny, Astro Bot style characters look lovely in the game’s colourful worlds. Co-op is well integrated, with players often performing separate but interlinked tasks.
Cons: Irritating to control and success often feels like chance rather than skill. In co-op, its random unfairness will test even the sturdiest friendship.
Score: 4/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £15.49
Publisher: Postmeta Games
Developer: PlayJoy Studios
Release Date: 5th November 2025
Age Rating: 3
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