Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown | PC Review

June 16, 2023 Kevin Honigford

Fly, chicken, fly! Rubber chickens are not anything I ever saw myself getting excited about, but Chicken Studio set out to prove me wrong with Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown. Crazy and fun party games have become a staple in my family’s repertoire, and this is one we didn’t see (or hear) coming.

Burn Rubber (Chickens)

Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown is exactly what the name implies: a lethal showdown of two to four rubber chickens, accented by traps and obstacles. It is exactly as crazy and comical as it sounds, with rubber chickens dressed in numerous costumes attempting to waylay their brethren. All while fighting to survive the onslaught of the others and the environments. Your rubber chicken starts each round equipped with standard grenades, and as the match progresses, numerous wacky weapons and zany tools will appear randomly throughout the battlefield. The weapons range from shotguns to rocket launchers to enemy-controlling laser guns, and the different tools let you do numerous things, such as flying across the arena or giving you go-go-gadget arms that will grab your opponents and let you drag them wherever you’d like. No need to scream in frustration when your opponent gets their hands on something powerful, however, as each weapon and item has a limited number of uses before combatants are reverted back to their lowly grenades. This mechanic is an ingenious way to keep the playing field level and fun for everybody the entire time.

For a co-op and competitive party game such as this, the controls felt great. They’re simple enough to allow anyone to join in on the excitement. Simply move, jump, and fire your wacky weapons to survive and thrive. Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown keeps the action fun and enjoyable, inducing bursts of laughter from the comic flare that is every match’s companion.

Quacking Up

The action in Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown is done in a very cartoony 3D world. You and your friends can choose either a regular game level, or one of the many user-created levels to do battle in. Piranha plants, spiked floors and walls, and dozens of other traps and obstacles abound in the cartoonish atmospheres. The music in the background is fairly insignificant, as the explosions and other sound effects are the primary auditory experience in Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown.

Final Verdict

Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown is an absolute blast of a game. My comrades and I spent hours laughing at what our rubber chickens were doing on screen, and it never got old. My only gripe, really, is that you aren’t able to use bots to fill out a battle. So if there’s three people in your party, you must wait for the server to find another player before you open war against each other. That being said, though, Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown is an arena battle game that you need to have ready on game night.

To hear me talk more about Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown, be sure to listen to the May 10, 2023 episode of the Gaming Outsider podcast around the 1:28:49 time stamp.

This review is based on a PC copy of Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown provided by Vicarious PR for coverage purposes. As of the time of this writing, it is exclusive to this platform.