Games Like Mowed Down

You are either the lawn or the mower

Half the lobby are props: wheelie bins, hay bales, dumpsters, beehives, letterboxes, safety cones. Stand still among the real thing and you are furniture. Move at the wrong moment and you are a suspiciously mobile letterbox. The rest drive ride-on mowers. The blade only cuts while you're moving, every real prop you run over stuns you, and the lawn keeps a stripe everywhere you've been, so the hunt is about reading the yard as much as driving it.

Build your own yard: the Map Maker

Mowed Down ships with a full map editor, the same one we use. Pick a size from a cosy 42 m plot to a 140 m sprawl, then paint it in:

Share it on the Steam Workshop

Press Publish and your map goes up to the Steam Workshop with a preview shot. Edit it and publish again to update the same item. Maps you subscribe to appear in the map picker for solo and online play, and when you host one, the game sends the map to everyone in the lobby, so your friends don't have to subscribe first.

Nine arenas, each built like the real place

Every arena is dressed as the place it's named after, at the size that place would be. The Farmyard is the biggest: a red barn and twin silos, a windmill, tractors and a combine, a chicken run and a greenhouse, with crop fields, an orchard and the farmhouse beyond the fence. City Park puts a fountain plaza, a bandstand, a duck pond and a playground inside iron railings, with the city all round. The Wildflower Meadow has a hedgerow, an old oak and a pond. In the Town Square you hide among market stalls and cafe tables round a fountain and a statue, under the church and the shopfronts. Downtown is a crossroads between brick blocks, with stalled cars and a bus at its stop. The Parking Lot is rows of parked cars outside a supermarket. The Overgrown Lot and the Back Alley are small and tight: wrecks, rubbish heaps and tyre stacks behind sagging chain-link, and a brick service yard with a loading dock and a warehouse in the middle. Plus the Backyard from the demo. Bigger arenas get a longer hunt clock. Each arena brings its own disguises, so you hide as a hay bale on the farm and a dumpster in the alley. Play any of them under nine skies, from Midday Sun and Golden Hour to Thunderstorm, Snowfall and a Midnight hunt in night-vision goggles.

Lobbies of up to 40

Host on Steam with friend invites, five-letter join codes and password-protected lobbies, or play over LAN by IP. A full lobby holds spectators who take the next free slot. The host sets the rules: Infected or Elimination, how many mowers, rounds per match, hide and hunt timers, grass regrowth, haunting ghosts, Loud Lawn open mic, and mutators such as Low Gravity, Caffeinated, Tiny Props, Decoy Swarm and Wobbly Wheels.

The lobby is a garden

Host or join and you're standing in a back garden with everyone else, each holding a weed whacker. Trim the long grass, whack a friend to BONK them flat, stand in the painted mower circle to volunteer as a hunter, and put a track on the jukebox. When everyone's ready, the host yanks the Big Mower's cord: it sputters, backfires and slaps them, then roars to life and charges the whole party into the match in a wall of grass clippings.

Hiding still wins the round. Showing off wins the match.

Props score Daredevil points only while a mower can see them: the closer the mower and the more you move in its view, the faster you score. Taunt under a hunter's nose, or hold it for a BIG TAUNT worth triple. Copy any prop you're standing next to, drop decoys of yourself, climb and cling to walls, and keep one zap for when a blade is about to reach you.

Four mowers, one dog

Dash, hop off ramps and ground-pound the lawn to stun every prop nearby. Mowers are solid to each other: bumps honk, dash-rams spin the other driver out, and a bad landing flips the mower and throws its driver across the lawn. Bring a dog, from a Labrador to a Robo-Dog (16 breeds): it joins the hunt and barks when it sniffs out a prop nearby. It doesn't say which one.

Caught isn't finished

In Elimination you come back as a ghost that can honk to send hunters after nothing, make the real props wobble, and haunt a mower so it steers like a shopping trolley. Your voice comes out of your prop, pitched to its size, and Loud Lawn puts the whole lobby on open mic. Every catch gets a kill-cam, every round a Play of the Round you can save as a GIF, and thirteen awards hand out the credit and the blame.

Also in the box

Try the free demo

The free demo has the Backyard, online lobbies of up to 6 and solo play. It's a separate Steam app, so demo lobbies only match with other demo players.