Beastieball

For almost thirty years, the creature-collecting RPG has worked the same way. You catch a monster, grind its level, use its best move, and repeat. Plenty of games have copied that structure. Few have asked whether it still works. Beastieball, from independent studio Wishes Ultd. and published by Klei, asks the question and answers it in an unexpected way: turn every battle into a volleyball match.

It sounds like a gimmick, and on paper it reads like one. Then the design starts to make sense. You play a coach traveling an open world and recruiting creatures called Beasties to build a team for the Crown Series tournament. Your roster includes more than 100 Beasties, each with its own stats, moves and play style. The goal isn’t to knock out an opponent’s pet. You wear down the opposing team’s stamina until they can no longer stop a ball from landing.

Klei’s backing matters. The studio behind Don’t Starve and Oxygen Not Included is known for picking idiosyncratic, systems-heavy projects and staying with them through long Early Access cycles. Beastieball fits that pattern. It’s on Steam for Windows and macOS, released November 12, 2024 at $24.99, with the full release expected in 2027.

The market position is clear. Beastieball goes after players who feel mainline Pokémon has drifted from what made it great: a readable, strategic battle system, a world you can explore freely, and a cast you actually care about. That’s a lot to take on, and in most areas the design earns the ambition.

• Grid-Based Volleyball Combat: Matches take place on a tactical court grid. Each turn you choose moves that attack, defend, block or set up plays. You win by wearing down the other team’s stamina until a ball gets through.
• 100+ Collectible Beasties: Each creature has its own stats, moveset and play style, so building a team is about roles, not just stacking the highest numbers.
• Relationship-Driven Combos: Beasties that play together build relationships. Those relationships unlock new abilities and combo plays, so team chemistry matters as much as raw strength.
• Non-Linear Coach Ladder: You can challenge ranked coaches in any order, which removes the fixed gym sequence the genre has relied on for decades.
• Social Progression With Rivals: Coaches you beat become available to hang out with, which deepens your friendship with them and unlocks extra story.
• Post-Game and Online PvP: A 15–25 hour campaign is followed by post-game content and online competitive play.

The Core Loop: Stamina Instead of Hit Points

Beastieball’s most important decision is replacing hit points with stamina and swapping the knockout for a scored point. The change sounds cosmetic, but it changes how you think about every turn.

In a traditional monster battle, the best move is usually whichever one deals the most damage. Defense is a side option you use only when you’re forced to. Here, defense is the game. A Beastie that blocks well or sets up a teammate can be worth more than your hardest hitter, because a point comes from pressure built up over several turns, not one big hit. You’re managing tempo, not trading damage. The closest comparison isn’t Pokémon. It’s a tactics game like Into the Breach, where positioning and sequencing decide the outcome and dice rolls don’t.

The grid court is what makes this work. Every Beastie has a position, and position decides what it can do. Attacking from a bad spot, or leaving a lane unguarded, has a visible cost that you can read and understand. That clarity is the design’s biggest strength. When you lose a point, the systems are built so you can almost always trace which decision caused it. For a strategy game, that’s the best compliment available: a loss teaches you something instead of feeling unfair.

Team Chemistry: The Real Progression System

The relationship system turns a good combat idea into an actual RPG. When Beasties play together, their bonds change, and that unlocks new abilities and combo plays. As a result, the team you’ve kept together often beats a team with better stats.

This fixes a problem the genre has had for a long time. Creature collectors ask you to catch everything, then give you every reason to bench nearly all of it and run your six best monsters until the credits. Beastieball rewards commitment in a different way. Switching in a stronger newcomer costs you combos your current lineup has already earned, so you have to decide whether to keep a group together or take the raw numbers. It’s a real trade-off, and it’s the kind of friction a management game needs.

There’s a risk, though. Any system that rewards staying with one lineup can quietly push players away from experimenting with the other hundred-plus Beasties. Wishes Ultd. will need to show, as the game gets closer to its full release, that new recruits can catch up fast enough to be worth trying. Right now, how much the incentives reward experimentation is an open question.

Structure: Killing the Gym Order

Letting you face ranked coaches in any order gets less attention than it should. For decades, creature collectors have been linear games that look like open ones: fixed badge orders, soft level gates, and routes blocked by some convenient obstacle. Beastieball drops that. You choose your route, and the challenge comes from the coaches rather than from the map.

That freedom puts a burden on the balance. A game that lets you go anywhere has to stay interesting no matter where you go first. The non-linear ladder is built to carry that weight, and it’s a big part of why the open structure works. It brings back the sense of discovery that Pokémon lost when it became a guided tour.

Narrative: Better Than It Needs to Be

The story has friends, rivals, corporate sponsors and a mysterious Sports King with big ambitions. None of that is groundbreaking, and it isn’t trying to be. The smart part is how the story is tied to progression. Beating a coach doesn’t just move you up the ladder. It makes that coach someone you can spend time with, and those hangouts deepen the friendship and unlock more story. Rivals become friends because of how you played against them, and the game gives you a reason to care about the people across the net as well as the creatures on your side.

It’s a small idea done well. In most games of this kind, the humans are there to hand out badges.

Pacing and Length

A 15–25 hour campaign is lean by genre standards, and that’s the right length. Beastieball doesn’t pad its runtime with forced grinding. Players who want more can move on to the post-game and online PvP, where a positional, tempo-driven combat system should hold up far better than the damage races of most monster battlers. How deep the competitive scene gets will depend on balance updates during Early Access.

The art direction is Beastieball’s quickest win. The creature designs are bright, expressive and easy to read, and the charm of both the Beasties and the human cast is evident in the art itself. More importantly, the visuals serve the game. On a tactical grid you need to read each Beastie’s position, role and state at a glance, and the clean, colorful style makes that easy.

The UI does the hardest job well. It turns a volleyball match into a set of turn-based decisions you can understand. Choosing to attack, defend, block or set up is presented clearly enough that the volleyball framing rarely gets in the way of the strategy.

The catch is the obvious one. This is Early Access, and polish is still being added before the full release. Expect some rough edges, content that is visibly unfinished, and systems that could be rebalanced from one patch to the next. None of this is a hidden defect. It’s what you sign up for when you buy an unfinished game.

Beastieball is on Steam for Windows and macOS, and a turn-based game suits a mouse and keyboard. Choosing a move, pointing at a spot on the grid and confirming the play are all precise, low-pressure inputs. Nothing punishes slow reactions, so the PC interface never gets in the way of the thinking.

The native macOS build deserves credit. Mac players are routinely skipped by games in this genre, and shipping a Mac version alongside Windows says a lot about the team’s priorities.

The Steam storefront also matters for an Early Access game. Updates are pushed automatically, and the community hub is where balance feedback builds up. For a game whose competitive modes will depend on tuning over time, that feedback channel is a practical necessity.

Beastieball is a rare genre game that understands why the original formula worked and then changes the parts that stopped working. Turning battles into volleyball isn’t a gimmick. It’s a structural fix. It makes defense matter, makes positioning readable, and rewards the teams you build instead of the single monster you over-level. With a non-linear world and a cast that gets closer to you through the game itself, the result feels closer to the magic of the late-‘90s games than anything the franchise that inspired it has made recently.

Early Access keeps it from a higher score. The content is still growing, the balance is still changing, and the finished game is a year or more away. Even so, the foundation is strong, and Klei has a track record of seeing long development cycles through. We recommend it for anyone willing to buy an unfinished game — this one is worth buying now.