Score: 2/5
This review is based on the first four episodes of Beast Games, which will air its remaining six episodes by Feb. 13.
MrBeast has had every right to hype up his new Amazon Prime Video game show Beast Games.
It’s a huge moment in YouTube history, with a massive budget and creative control given to an online influencer by a streaming platform other than YouTube for the first time. When MrBeast calls this project unprecedented, he’s not joking around — this has the potential to revolutionize the creator economy and give more influencers the opportunity to experiment with high-budget shows on streaming platforms in the future.
It’s such a shame, then, that this highly ambitious series came with such flawed execution.
As MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, stands atop his specially constructed tower shouting instructions to the hundreds of contestants waiting down below, it’s hard not to be taken aback by the sheer magnitude of the YouTube titan’s latest project. The impressive sets and machinery used throughout each episode didn’t come cheap: it’s reported that the series’ budget is around $100 million USD thanks to Donaldson’s partnership with Amazon.
But Donaldson is no stranger to large spectacles, as many of his 341 million subscribers (as of writing) will tell you. When he’s not giving away outrageous sums of money through his elaborate challenges, he’s spending seven days stranded on an island, building 100 wells in Africa and paying trained assassins to hunt him down. He regularly has access to large budgets, and to the man’s credit, he usually knows how to make a good show out of it.
But as Donaldson has stated several times, Amazon gave him his largest budget ever, so it was time for him to put on his biggest show yet. Within the first four episodes of Beast Games, Donaldson has shown off 1,000 functioning trapdoors, a makeshift village complete with a tower and housing, and a $1.8 million private island he’s prepared to give away to a contestant. On top of all that, he’s already given away millions of dollars to contestants and we’re not even halfway through the season.
That’s why it was so surprising when I was left with one question throughout my viewing of the show’s opening episodes:
Why am I not impressed?
After all, MrBeast’s YouTube content has blown me away in the past. In particular, his recreation of season one of Netflix’s Squid Game left me amazed after my first viewing, as did many other videos on his channel. It simply didn’t make sense that the project with his largest budget yet could leave me the most unsatisfied — a problem when the man’s entire persona is built on impressing viewers with his over-the-top stunts and escapades.
The problem with Beast Games is that Donaldson seems to have put all its budget into its spectacle without much room left for genuine substance.
Imagine you’re seated in a grand colosseum surrounded by large flamethrowers blasting fire into the night sky. An orchestra is playing a thumping drumroll as thousands of audience members sit in anticipation of an amazing show. The stars watch down from the heavens as two contestants enter the massive arena and meet in the centre. You hold your breath, prepared for a life-changing battle between the competitors — when out of nowhere, they both sit on the ground cross-legged and start playing an everyday game of rock-paper-scissors.
That’s what it’s like watching an episode of Beast Games.
See, MrBeast can spend as much as he wants on impressive set pieces and huge machinery, but that doesn’t change the fact that the actual games feel like they were designed mere moments in advance. The games played throughout the show — you know, the entire purpose of the competition — constantly feel half-baked and unpolished, like they were thrown together as an afterthought long after the sets had already been constructed.
The large tower that stands at the end of the village is used as the centrepiece of the show’s second episode, but it hardly feels essential to the games that are played there. Most of the games feel like they could have worked in an open field or a middle school gymnasium, but were placed in a special tower just to make them feel more exciting than they actually are.
Sure, the contestants might be standing in a tower made specifically for this show, but that doesn’t change the fact that one game is simply an oversized version of throwing a ping pong ball into a cup, or another where they simply need to catch balls before they touch the ground.
One particularly egregious moment happens when MrBeast has his contestants leave the tower to play a game of general trivia, featuring such riveting questions as “who founded Amazon?” Donaldson’s visible surprise at how well his contestants perform at these braindead-easy questions should form an indication of how ill-prepared he and his team were when it came to putting together legitimate tests of skill that required any semblance of effort to develop.
Speaking of lazy challenge design, it’s also worth mentioning that a significant portion of the “games” played throughout these first few episodes are self-elimination challenges, which means that they require selfless contestants to eliminate themselves so that other players can move on in their stead.
There’s certainly a place for self-elimination challenges in this type of game show, and when used effectively they can be some of the most emotionally effective segments of these series, as any viewer of Squid Game’s marbles episode will tell you. Self-elimination challenges can and should be an excellent psychological game for contestants that reveal their true intentions.
The problem is that self-elimination challenges should be used sporadically to maximize the shock value on contestants and viewers when they’re revealed, not consistently used in place of more traditional challenges that test players’ skill and ability. When too many challenges are based on self-elimination, they begin to feel like a lazy cop-out meant to replace direct challenges that, again, require effort or genuine thought to develop. It also eventually begins feeling like more people have left by self-elimination than through direct challenges, which makes the whole production feel cheap.
Whether this flawed challenge design is a result of laziness, lack of creativity, flawed time management or something of a combination, it’s all very frustrating, especially since it’s coming from MrBeast. The creator has become somewhat known for his creative YouTube challenges that test contestants’ willpower and skill, so it’s a shame to see his largest budget ever squandered on a bunch of games that feel like they came out of first grade orientation day.
Compare these undercooked challenges to those from Squid Game, a clear inspiration behind Beast Games. In Squid Game, much of the set design is a large, intentional part of the specific games that have been selected.
Red Light, Green Light isn’t played in a stadium simply for the sake of spectacle, it’s because the game requires a large playing ground for contestants to move freely. Tug-of-War isn’t played over a gaping pit just to look cool, it’s because contestants need a place to fall if their team fails. Glass Bridge is perhaps the most obvious example in which the set itself is the game, as stepping on the wrong tile will leave a contestant plummeting to their doom.
Obviously, Beast Games differs from Squid Game in that the former is trying (with varying degrees of success) not to injure or harm its contestants, so some of those exact set choices would probably be ill-advised. However, there’s still a clear difference between the two shows in that Squid Game chooses sets that are thoughtfully intrinsic to the games that have been chosen, while Beast Games feels like its sets are only grandiose because its designers couldn’t figure out where else to spend their massive budget.
There’s no denying that Beast Games is impressive on a technical level, but the main problem is that it feels like all the attention went toward its sets while the games feel like they were thrown together five minutes before playing them. The fundamental misunderstanding by Donaldson and his team is that for a game show to become truly enthralling, the games should remain at the core of the experience, not feel like an afterthought.
Beast Games could have the largest budget in the world, but if its producers don’t know how to spend it, then the spectacle has fallen apart before it’s even begun.