Black magic is now a thing, letting you gather souls from killed players to fuel spells and mystic signs, on top of the firearms and vehicles you’d expect from a more mundane sort of shooter. Since leaving Early Access last December, Cuisine Royale has flown the rest of the way off into post-Fortnite craziness. The “Cuisine” in question comes from the ability to use pots and pans as makeshift armor as you explore the map, with refrigerators instead of lootboxes. It began as an April Fools’ joke by the creators of an MMO World War II shooter called Enlisted that’s still in development, but Cuisine Royale rapidly grew into a project in its own right. Like PUBG, 2018’s Cuisine Royale is still releasing updates and catering to a relatively small but fervent group of fans Cuisine Royale’s is an order of magnitude lower, sure, but it’s there. Every other battle royale has a bunch of stuff grafted on top of it to make it look like it isn’t a PUBG clone, and that counts for something. You can argue with some of its developers’ recent moves, like adding bots, but this is still the whole genre’s foundation stone. Fortnite’s crazier, Apex has better movement and loot handling, and Warzone’s got better gunplay, but PUBG’s still the baseline for the battle-royale experience, stripped down with limited gimmicks. Playing it now, PUBG already feels like a time capsule. By any standard, PUBG is a major success, and still has a pool of regular players that’s comfortably in six digits… but in 2020, it’s consistently overshadowed on all sides by the games that it inspired. It’s sold over 60 million units across platforms as of December 2019, with 600 million downloads of PUBG Mobile, and it’s why we’re even talking about “battle royale” as a genre right now. PUBG enjoys a dedicated fanbase, a solid Twitch following, and its own esports league, with the Continental Series Charity Showdown planned for May 14th to the 31st. Now in Season 7, good old PUBG is still out there doing the work. If you just want a mindless shoot-and-loot, Apex isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s got raw speed, creativity, and a broad range of characters on its side. Matchup knowledge can go a long way–that team has a Gibraltar, don’t go on a full offensive until his shield’s gone down–as can mastering the ping system for effective field communication. That, and its high general level of polish, won it an instant following that took everyone, including EA, off guard.īecause Apex has a higher time-to-kill for most characters than is the standard in the genre, you have to get creative on the fly to secure your wins. Strategy and team composition count for a lot more than twitch reflexes here. Unusually for a battle royale, the “ Legend” you pick defines both your individual and team strategy, as it would in a hero shooter or MOBA your character isn’t just a random cipher in a funny hat, but offers multiple unique tactical and mobility options. Local stay-at-home orders just accelerated the process.Īpex is on the other end of a curve from Warzone, with smaller squads and much larger health pools. Call of Duty already sells like crazy once a year when you staple one of the most addictive sub-genres in the business on top of it, you can’t help but pull people in. Call of Duty: WarzoneĪctivision announced recently that Warzone had surpassed 60 million downloads in its first two months of operation, because of course it did. Here are our picks for the top battle-royale games available now, with one newcomer that we’re particularly excited about. Thankfully, due to that uncharacteristic restraint by the larger video game industry, battle royales are a healthy sub-genre that just keeps getting better over time. There are more battle royale games out there than a lot of players realize, since the top three take up a lot of the oxygen in the room, but we never reached that theorized crisis point where every shooter with more than two fans launched its own last-man-standing mode. As it turned out, that didn’t really happen, at least not yet.
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