Here it is. Ubisoft has made their entry into the already crowded Battle Royale market featuring a battle pass and everything in-between. Let’s just jump into this.
For those of you that aren’t aware. Battle Royale as a concept is very simple, bunch of people spawn in on a map, the map gets smaller, good loot is relatively hard to find and you all kill each other to see who’s last man standing. Typically played in teams or solos. It’s not a massively hard concept to implement, it’s been done before and it’s been beaten 40 times over by every other AAA Company / Indie company releasing their take on it. Ubisoft isn’t any different and are coming into this very late, so obviously there needs to be some big innovation to take away from the giants like Call of Duty Warzone and Fortnite.
Gameplay
Starting off, gameplay is solid, you run, jump and generally fly about. They’ve integrated Twitch pretty well and it’s clear they’re going after the streamer market with this one. Every game has the chance to have voting where you (as a viewer) can vote on which modifier to implement such as;
- Infinite Ammo
- Less Gravity
- Etc..
Honestly, what I can I say about the gameplay. It’s a first person shooter in 2020, it plays like a first person shooter in 2020. You aim at things, press button and they generally die. It’s not a slow based game and you often find yourself jumping over rooftops or getting killed from above. It is absolute chaos and that seems to be the theme they’re going with. You won’t find any slow and methodical gameplay here like in Players Unknown Battlegrounds, no this is all out explosions and abilities.
Being able to pick up power-ups is pretty cool, healing your team mates and providing yourself armour is two life lines that I would find very annoying if I’m playing against, but amazing if I’m playing as. I actually used this in the recent SwitchedBit video to defend my self against an enemy and then kill them. You can watch that here:
Feedback
This is a technical test, so the best time to talk about everything technical with the game. The frame rate is massive, like I’m talking Trump levels of bigly. Sitting at around 300FPS on Ultra, it plays fantastically and I never had any hitching or hit reg issues. It performs solid. Finding a game was rather easy aswell, quite quick, although I would like if the intro area was sped up a little bit, felt like waiting about too much. Hiting with the sniper is near impossible. Models are so small and it’s a large map so people are rather far away. If you are good with the sniper, you might do well but I’d prefer it if body shots could be a one hit kill. The pod system that spawns you into the map is really cool, basically everyone spawns from one point and you get to fly where ever you want. Nice change from the usual Bus / Plane idea.
Is there still room?
Honestly, I don’t know. So many games want your time these days. I feel like the only reason Battle Royale games fall off these days isn’t because the game is bad, either community or a decision was made which didn’t sit right with the fans. Take the following:
- Fortnite: Is seen as the meme game for kids
- PUBG: Seen as the old dog, no one plays this anymore according to the internet yet it’s still one of the top 10 games.
- Warzone: The new one on the scene, has everyone gunning for it right now, everyones trying to get famous on Warzone.
Now we’re on Hyper Scape, which not to hate on it. The name isn’t exactly great. I find myself so often saying Hyper Space or Hyper Skype it conflicts so much with what I really want to say.
Conclusion
Honestly, I can’t see this really going anywhere… Hype around the game seems to have died pretty quickly Twitch at the time of writing this as 30k viewers when Warzone has around 47k. To me, a brand new game in tech test with a drops enabled twitch stream should be pulling far more. Personally, I’m tired of the genre and I can’t see enough in this game to differentiate between the other games. As always I recommend watching the video to get my full thoughts on the game as I’ll be speaking on what I’m actually seeing. If I had to pick a BR game to play however, it would be this. I just wished it released sooner because I’m just tired of the genre.