PWB: May

Is that on Gamepass?

Nope, sadly not.

Knockout City – EA's volleyball 'shooter' – is surprisingly good fun.

Gave this a look earlier and it's pretty good, alright – but it mostly just made me appreciate the simplicity of Splatoon's design all the more.

I dropped back into Splatoon 2 for a couple matches a few weeks back, and was in awe of how easy it was to jump into matches – even after months away – and still feel like I was contributing to the team even without knowing the maps or having any voice chat.

Mostly this is down to the entire objective being separate from the combat. You can splat paint around even if you don't have the best reflexes or reactions. The battle over terrain means there are natural (and evolving!) choke points and bottlenecks. You don't need to worry about being ambushed in your own territory, so getting back into the thick of the action is really quick.

It's also much more straightforward than Knockout City, which feels like it's got a couple of mechanics too many for its own good. I could do without the gliding,or turning myself into a ball, personally.

I'd be curious to see how it goes with a team and chat, but the odds of getting that together is pretty small for me.

Knockout City is pretty fun, in a straight-to-video Splatoon sort of way. It's a bit let down by long periods of downtime between matches, though: in an era when pretty much all of the big online games have eliminated that, it makes it feel curiously dated.

Also it's clearly based around teamwork, with lots of options for passing and throwing each other around, and none of the randoms online are interested in that at all, so it's just a bunch of people running around and chucking balls at each other. It's fun, but I can't see it lasting the distance.