With $5 million dollars on the line, Season 2 of Jimmy Donaldson’s “Beast Games” plays on big stakes and the “go big or go home” mentality.
Jimmy Donaldson, better known as “Mr. Beast,” is a famous YouTuber with 462 million subscribers who has been working with Amazon to release the “Beast Games” TV show. The first season of the show was released December 2024 and its second season released Jan. 7 with its finale scheduled for Feb. 25, all available to watch on Amazon Prime Video. The show features different competitors who compete in elaborate elimination challenges, where the final person standing receives the $5 million dollar prize.
Though Season 1 had 500 competitors of any occupation, Season 2 has 200 competitors, which I thought was better since there would be more time to feature more competitors in-depth. The theme of this season was “smart vs. strong,” where there were 100 competitors with a physical advantage and 100 competitors with an intelligent advantage.
A lot of the challenges were more on the physically demanding side, such as dodgeball and obstacle course racing, which put the smart contestants at a big disadvantage. Though there are still more episodes left in the season, with the season being halfway done there still have been significantly more strength-based challenges.
One of my favorite aspects that the show highlights is seeing how the competitors work against or with each other in order to win the money. In one of the high stakes challenges, teams of five pick a captain who is placed on the top of a building with a buzzer. The buzzer displays a large amount of cash, up to $1 million, and the captain has to choose to either press the buzzer to receive the cash but eliminate all of their teammates, or give up the money and leave their peers in the game. This specific challenge does a good job at tensing up dynamics between teams and encouraging players to betray their peers. I found myself fixated on the challenge, trying to guess which captain would make a grab for the money first.
Another big part of Season 2 is that they brought back key players from Season 1, including the previous winner. It was intriguing to see how some of the experienced players were shut out for their previous actions while others were embraced onto cliques with open arms.
Despite there being a lot of different challenges, I found some of the games to be lackluster. For example, a game called “Bluff” was chosen by players who believed they were good at lying. However, none of them ended up lying to get each other eliminated and with no other option, Mr. Beast was forced to randomly eliminate competitors.
Some of the games were hits to me, including the obstacle racing challenge where teams of five had to race one on one against each other through the course. What I really liked was that the objective of each round changed, one round was which team could get all their members across first while another was just one race with their best racer.
One of the episodes had a “Survivor” themed crossover with Jeff Probst, where 10 competitors of the remaining group of competitors would compete for an island. Though the games were entertaining to watch, I would rather the games be an elimination round. Knowing that there were not going to be any eliminations from the “Survivor” themed challenges, I found the episode more anticlimactic as there were not as high stakes as a normal episode.
Overall, “Beast Games” makes for an enjoyable and entertaining watch. I would give it a ⅗ stars.
