Among Us (2018)

It's hard to get a full, active lobby going online with strangers in 2025 -- the game's popularity has definitely died a lot. However, if you can get a group of friends going (a full lobby of 10+ is best) this is SO much fun.

Always worth playing a bit regardless because of how memetically impactful this game was (not many games have fundamentally changed language and slang like this one has), but otherwise it probably won't be engaging for long if you're just playing alone with strangers via the in-game chat.

I always end up going back to this whenever I find people willing to play it with me - it's funny, addictive, and charming.

Among us was a completely new concept and a unique new experience for me. It is so simple, yet so fun to play.

You play with a group of people and friends, in different spaceship maps, each containing a different area. On a map, different rooms with various tasks are present. The crew members, aka the “good guys”, need to complete the tasks to win the game. When everyone is done with their chores, victory is theirs.

Meanwhile, one player is an imposter, who pretends to be a crew mate, but is secretly murdering everyone and sabotaging their work. It is the imposter’s goal to murder everyone or to hold off the completing of tasks, until the timer runs out.

When other players find a body, or saw something suspicious, they can call for a meeting. In this meeting, dead players are muted and the rest can determine who the imposter might be. This can be done in text or speech. When people know or suspect someone, a vote can be cast, after which the player with the most votes is yeeted out of the space ship.

The imposter has some handy tricks up his sleeve. He can sabotage certain parts of the ship like communications, oxygen, overheating or overheating the reactors. In this events, the other players cannot continue with their work until the problem is solved. Giving the imposter the time to hunt down lone players or to escape through the many air vents in the game for fast travel.

In terms of graphics, Among Us is nothing special. It uses simple and jolly 2D graphics with fluent animations. The cartoon style really fits the game well.

The sound on the other hand is solid. Alarms are loud and trigger your attention, the soft footsteps, the sound of a vent opening, it is all great and mysterious. All sounds also really help you determine what is going on around you, it is just very well implemented.

The controls are fluent and easy to understand. It takes some time to learn all the buttons and actions but you will get used to it soon enough.

This game is really all about tactics, choosing the right moment and timing your sabotages right. Matches can be over in seconds because someone betrayed their identity at the start of the game, and sometimes, a match goes on for a good half hour because the cards have been played so well, nobody has the slightest clue who could be the imposter. There are just so many different ways in which you can play this game. With big groups, the game is a lot of fun because the imposters are now with two and the length of the match, confusion and overall chaos is increased. I found it especially fun with a group of friends.

The only downside to Among Us are the idiots or trolls that sometimes join matches, just to cause some uproar and fights between players. They spoil stuff, put random stuff in the chat that makes no sense or do not actively engage in the meetings to determine who is the imposter.

Another small issue is the hostility of some players. They take the game way too serious and when accused or accusing someone, it sometimes actually feels like someone is trying to solve a murder on their loved ones. People get mad sometimes or vote you out of the space ship just because you did not give the response they wanted. Of course, this is a small group of people, but it can still be annoying sometimes.

The game play is repetitive because you always have the same objective, but with this game, it is just perfect and does not need any other modes or styles of playing.

In the end, I think this is one of the most surprising and fun games I have played in a while and I would recommend it to everyone.

FINALLY! Something new for multiplayer!

Is Among Us entirely new? No. But the flow is so good, that makes it deserving of the spotlight.

RPGs, Shooters... They're all good. But I miss a lot more ways to play with my friends. I feel after Game Cube, people just gave up trying. Multiplayer games are still here but... they're all trying to be "the new one that will do the same thing".

Among Us reminds...err...US, that still has a lot to explore in the real of multiplayer. New experiences to make. And remind US what gaming is all about...

FUN

i'm really bad at deception and mindgames and tend to prefer cooperative play, so this game was never gonna click with me. still, i have to give it the score i think it deserves.

among us is a bit like new horizons in that it fulfills a specific need of a particular point in time. i wouldn't be surprised if it turned up in a history book someday as an example of safe social activity during the 2020 quarantine. therefore i believe, like with any other review of any other piece of media, this context should hold at least a little weight in the score it receives. some media is nothing special when observed in a vacuum, but sprinkle in the sociocultural, political, religious, etc. landscape of its time and it becomes something else.

i don't think this is the case with among us, however — it stands pretty solidly on its own two (maybe 4 or 6 if you have the little clone skins) feet regardless of anything else. the mechanical learning curve is basically nonexistent (except maybe for vent-hopping), leaving it all up to the player's ability to manipulate the truth and the game toward victory. some, like me, don't enjoy the process of doing so and have no interest learning that particular skill, and thus will find themselves abandoning the game pretty quickly. others will get the hang of it much quicker and find endless amounts of fun in chubby pixel murder.

the fun i did have in among us happened mostly when i was crewmate. completing tasks is an oddly soothing process once you get used to the fact that your laid-back nature makes you a natural target and you might not last very long. i also have to note that if you want to be cooperative in among us, that can also be a really important part of the game. rather than every man for themself, crewmates often walk in pairs or small groups in order to raise their chances of catching the impostor(s). plural — many (possibly most) games have two or more impostors, who then have their own coop minigame to deal with if they want to succeed. the game has a little to give for a lot of different social dynamics, all working together to make it very obvious why it became so successful when it did.

more than anything, i would recommend playing among us with a group of friends. in my (limited) experience, public games tend to quickly die due to people leaving shortly after the beginning of the round or after they're caught slipping. it can also be hard to get people to communicate to the level required for this game to function as it should. i imagine that with friends there's even the added fun of learning each other's quirks and go-to tacticts and watching the gameplay evolve with time as people themselves adapt to one another.

IDK how we ended up with not one, but two viral online multiplayer silly party games starring colorful marshmallow Telletubby people taking the world by storm in the same year, but I guess that's what 2020 demanded. And just like Fall Guys, I feel like Among Us is the sort of game that is a lot more entertaining to watch than to actually play. Your mileage will vary, of course.

I think my biggest problem is that I'm just no good at lying (so I always insta-fail at werewolf-style games). But regardless, my experience playing this with friends is that there isn't any point in the crewmates attempting to complete the actual space ship tasks, because they've never gotten even a fourth of them completed before a bunch of them have been killed off by the imposters. Sometimes the crew solves the case (either by actually noticing things, or by dumb luck), and sometimes they don't. But either way I just don't care for this song and dance.

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I discovered Among Us from a few Youtubers as it crept into internet popularity under Fall Guys' shadow. This game is really fun...when you get to play it.

The game itself is really solid, thriving off the interactions between the players as they desperately struggle to discover who the impostors are before everyone is killed off. The gameplay has enough depth to allow for multiple strategies for both the crewmates and the impostors. Don't let its cartoony style deceive you: this game can be intense.

When you get to play it.

The servers are simply unable to handle a large playerbase, making it impossible to play at certain times - even in private lobbies!

There also are not enough localized servers, meaning that you will sometimes be forced to search for rooms that speak English on an English server. The Philippines in particular are in desperate need of their own server; this game has a large Filipino playerbase which plays on the English server, and this is not a game you can play without being able to understand the other players. This means that English players who do not speak Tagalog are forced to hop from one lobby to another searching for players they can understand, while Filipinos are ejected from English lobbies for speaking Tagalog.

Rather than address these issues, the developers have announced that they are making an Among Us 2. I personally think this is a bad idea. They should instead focus on improving the first game and building a healthier relationship with their playerbase. Among Us would also benefit from additional content such as more maps, so an Among Us 2 seems a bit premature.

In all, I recommend Among Us. Its an absolute blast to play and I've met some great people. But that's only when you get to play, and are not forced to attempt to connect to a server for over an hour.

EDIT: Many of the issues I highlighted have been corrected in recent updates. The conflict between Tagalog and English speaking servers has been pretty much fixed, and the servers are running a bit better (although there are still issues). All the more reason to play this game!