Are you ready for a battle royale without guns and or swords but just your fists? Then get ready for Headsnatchers where the whole focus is beating down others to steal their heads! Customize your heads with hundreds of items, accessories and cosmetics to create your own unique head to guard from your friends! Compete in numerous mini games and be the first to win and score using heads in various and sometimes strange ways. Play with up to 4 friends online—2 on the same console—and let heads roll…literally!

The main premise of Headsnatchers is all about fun multiplayer with friends and/or strangers. Compete in several mini-games using the heads of your opponents. Go online to play with 4 others or play with friends on the same screen for maximum enjoyment! There’s also a single player—which we will talk about later—if players need a break from the non-stop fun to be had online. Headsnatchers is still in early access so please expect some things to be updated and/or fixed as the game heads towards full completion.

Headsnatchers is all about stealing heads from your enemies and using them in whatever way possible. Your goal is simple, get points by completing tasks with the heads you snatch. However, that goal is shared by your competition who wishes to steal your head for the exact same reason! Punch, jump and run to survive and score your points! Who will win this frantic competition!?

Currently, multiplayer games that allow for frantic gameplay with friends are loved by all, including us here at Honey’s Anime. There’s just something comedic about hearing friends shouting and having a grand time playing some insane game such as Gang Beasts. That’s why when we heard about Headsnatchers made by developer IguanaBee, our eyes lit up at the thoughts of another fun mini-game themed battle royale. After playing this early access title, we have some praises and some issues. Let us see what works—and doesn’t—in our review of Headsnatchers for the PC.

If one were to explain Headsnatchers to someone, they would probably look at you strangely. The main goal of Headsnatchers is to take the heads off your opponents and use them in ways to score points. An example of this is a mini-game where players must use the heads of the other players as a bowling balls to knock down their pins. This may sound very strange but this is the first positive element to Headsnatchers. When Headsnatchers works, it makes for some really fun times.

The mini-games—of which there are only 6 available for the early access—is where Headsnatchers works perfectly. There’s just something exciting about running around trying to punch your friends, pick up their heads and then using the head to score a touchdown or slam dunk. Even when we were only in games with a few people, we still were smiling as we frantically tried to avoid losing our heads. We hope to see more mini-games in the full version of Headsnatchers but for now, the 6 maps are enough for some good times to be had. Equally, you can spend some nice amount of time creating custom heads—with hundreds of options—that while they can’t be used online yet, at least can be used in games with friends for some extra laughter to be had looking at the strange creations people have made.

Unfortunately, if you have problems finding games online—which we ran into numerous times—and don’t have friends playing Headsnatchers, you’ll begin to see the major issues with this game. When you can’t play with friends, you’ll be forced to play the single player which is a platforming focused mode that fails in fun and execution. The jumping is utterly horrible where trying to jump two feet will sometimes send you ten feet forward or vice versa. Equally, the mode itself is just repetitive and lacks the enjoyment the multiplayer modes have. Stay away from the single player mode for the time being in Headsnatchers; maybe in the later updates it will work better. For now, it’s a horrible mode that lacks fun in any form. At least, the single player looks good thanks to the solid visuals Headsnatchers offers.

Speaking about visuals, let’s conclude our review of Headsnatchers on a good note and speak about how it looks. Headsnatchers’ cartoonish visuals look impressive with a vast amount of detail in backgrounds and the heads. While it won’t push your graphics card to the limits—which we didn’t expect it to honestly—it at least looks sharp. The music too is pretty good with several tunes that keep things from being mute. The single player song though is over used and honestly forced us to mute it after dying numerous times so we just used our own music during our single player runs.

Headsnatchers is insanely fun and frantic when you get some friends and or random matches going, that much we will flat out admit. Unfortunately, for Headsnatchers to be truly enjoyable, you actually need to be able to find friends who also own Headsnatchers and/or anyone in general and that will be a challenge with the lack of players currently playing. This is the sad problem with Headsnatchers—or any indie multiplayer—that it relies on players to be successful. Headsnatchers does have single player but its repetitive gameplay and terrible platforming make it a weak alternative to some truly great multiplayer elements. If you do plan on getting Headsnatchers—which we hope many of you do—consider asking friends to buy it with you. This way, you won’t ever have issues enjoying what is otherwise a solid indie multiplayer game. Now let’s hope the full release fixes some of the issues

Headsnatchers is a game we could honestly see ourselves playing for quite a while here at Honey’s Anime HQ. We just hope that more people download Headsnatchers—on the PC namely—so it will do better and have more people we can play with. For now though, Headsnatchers is a game best bought with friends so you’ll never be alone and forced to play the ho-hum single player. Are you thinking about picking up Headsnatchers? Tell us why in the comments below and equally what your thoughts are about the game. For more gaming related articles and reviews be sure to keep stuck to our hive here at Honey’s Anime!