Goons: Legends & Mayhem pitches itself as a 3v3 hockey game played against one goalie on half of the rink. The single player mode is supposed to be mostly an extended tutorial to help you learn the mechanics of how to play multiplayer, but the campaign doesn’t ever actually have you play a match that has all of those features. This is a strange game.
Most of your time in Goons single player will be spent in combat, for some reason. This most often means skating around lakes and fighting waves of three different enemy types until the game decides you can move on. I think this idea could have worked considering how big of a role fights play in the hockey stereotype, but Goons just doesn’t do anywhere near enough with its systems for how often it makes you fight these enemies. Since you can spawn infinite pucks and quick shots automatically aim at the nearest enemy, two of the three enemy types can be easily defeated by just mashing shoot until you win. The third type is immune to quick shots, but too slow to pose any threat, so you can just save it for last and kill it with your special. None of this is ever interesting, but you probably spend half of the campaign doing it.
Besides a couple of minigames that aren’t really worth mentioning, the other piece of unique campaign content is the boss fights. These are creative, but most of them also amount to pressing shoot a bunch until the boss is weakened and then launching a slap shot. They’re better than the fights since the visuals are unique and you usually have at least a small puzzle to work out, but they’re still nothing particularly special.
The campaign also throws you into a bunch of hockey matches that deviate from the rules of the main game by either having fewer players per team or by being played on a full rink. I’m not sure why it never has the proper 3v3 half rink mode that the game is supposed to be about, but it gets close enough that you can tell it needed more time in the oven. The main problem is that it never feels very skill-based. Face offs are won by rock paper scissors, so those are just straight RNG, but CPU players on both teams are pretty terrible about working themselves into shooting positions, so for the most part both sides are just shooting right at the goalie and hoping for the best. I ended up finding that the most reliable strategy was to just constantly mash the check button when I didn’t have the puck and constantly mash shoot when I did. Mashing check would usually result in a takeaway before too long and mashing shoot would mean I probably score if a rebound happens to come back to me. It’s not very fun to play this way, but it’s far more reliable than passing to the AI that refuses to ever be anywhere useful.
Conclusion
I do think there’s a little bit of fun to be had here if you somehow have at least four people who want to play and can fill out a match with two or more human players per side. It still won’t be very deep, let alone as good as something like Tape to Tape, but it could be fun for a bit. I don’t recommend playing against bots at all, and finding another group to play against online is probably hopeless. The single player is not worth the price of entry on its own unless you enjoy the writing far more than I did, but you can at least get a sense of the game’s humor within the first five minutes. Unfortunately, there’s not much positive I can say about Goons.
Rating: 50%
Time to beat: 2 hours for the campaign, but I mashed through almost all the cutscenes. Maybe another 1-1.5 hours if you read it all.
Price: $20
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