This past weekend I got to play with the closed beta of My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble. This game is a full battle royale utilizing the characters and abilities of the cast of My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble. The current cast of characters available to play were the following:
- Izuku Midoriya (played as)
- Katsuki Bakugo (played as)
- Ochaco Uraraka (played as)
- Shoto Todoroki (did not play as)
- Tsuyu Asui (played as)
- All Might (played as)
- Cementoss (didn’t play as)
- Mount Lady (played as)
- Tomura Shigaraki (did not play as)
- Dabi (played as)
- Himiko Toga (played as)
- mr. Compress (didn’t play as)
That’s more characters than I initially thought would be available, and as you can see I tried to play them all. Well, now I’m working on my thoughts on the beta.
Detroit Smash
My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble divides the game into eight teams of three people each. It’s usually best to play different roles in the game, but you can’t play the same character as anyone else on your team. This was a shame because I wanted us to play as three All-Mights on my team just to see how much fun that could be, but unfortunately it wasn’t meant to be.
You choose the location where you start on the map while a timer counts down. You can see where your allies fall before the timer runs out, but once the timer hits zero, everyone’s choices are displayed on the screen, giving you a quick look at the enemies around you. You arrive at the island where all this takes place, scrambling to find chests and items like you would in any other Battle Royale. Items you can get are potions, guard potions, level-up cards, backpacks, and other player skill cards. Potions boost your health to the max. Guard increases your Guard Meter to what can be maxed out for your character. If you get damaged, your guard will be affected. Once your protection is exhausted, your character’s health will be affected. Guard takes less damage from attacks than health, so it’s very important that you keep your guard meter filled.
Each hero and villain has access to three different abilities; one that is ranged and two that are unique to the character. They also have a great special type of ability that is very special to the character. For example, All Might can jump very far and Mount Lady can grow enormously. Each character plays very differently with their unique abilities. They also have different roles, support, damage dealer, fast, etc. I didn’t play every character the beta had to offer, but I really enjoyed the ones I played. I liked playing as Mount Lady the most simply because I liked getting so big and becoming a distraction, but also because I could deal massive AoE damage at close range in big brawls. The bad thing is that it also alerts people to your location, as the map itself can have multiple regions, but it’s flat enough that you can see quite a distance.
I honestly prioritized my ranged skills whenever possible because it seemed like a lot of players would walk away by default if they were low on health. Fights felt extremely chaotic at times, especially when full-team battles were happening. If it was just you versus someone else, they seem manageable, but sometimes you’ll get a stray explosion that will knock you off another fight, or you’ll surprise another player and try to kill you or the person you fought with. If you get knocked down, you have to wait 20 seconds for someone to pick you up or not get hit, and then your character will just stand up anyway. It was fun when someone randomly attacked the guy you attacked as you go down so you could crawl away from the battlefield for 20 seconds to get back into the action.
If you eventually die, you can still get extra points by cheering on your teammates, and if they get a kill while you were cheering for them, you’ll also get points from that kill. If you really want to, you can swap your camera for someone on one of the other teams who gets a lot of kills and encourage them to get more points. Most of the time, though, I didn’t care that much about points, as the beta gave you a ton of in-game currency. I got most if not all I wanted for the characters I played with because there wasn’t much variety for them at the moment. Chances are, however, that will change when the game launches, and we’ll be getting a lot of add-ons and more cosmetics than we can possibly handle.
Fashionable Heroes
Let’s take a look at the more cosmetic side of this game. You start with a basic outfit and an in-game store where you can buy different outfits, voices and emotes with the in-game currency called coins. If you have enough coins, you can buy gacha pulls. During the beta, we got a lot of free subpoenas on the gacha, just to log in, every day the beta went on.
You also have tickets to draw for game play and life and in-game kills. I believe I have all of Deku’s outfits, voice lines, and emotes in the game, and probably all of them for a few other characters, which made me really happy. Some of these outfits look really good. You have some of the staples of the series, such as the UA outfits for the students, you get the striped suit from All Might, various rogue suits that appeared in the series for the villains, and even some fun casual outfit designs.
Plus Ultra
Overall, I thought the beta played pretty well. Not too much of a whine to be a beta. The hit boxes made sense, and there can be balance issues like Dabi and Todaroki with very powerful AoE abilities that set fire to places that can kill you if you just travel around them. Having really unique playstyles for each character is a huge plus and adds a lot of variety to the game. I didn’t like how soft it feels when your guard meter is gone, but I appreciate having 20 seconds to survive and get up without the need for allies to pick you up.
That aside, My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble has the makings of a good battle royale game. It’s a good start for anime games that go into the battle royale formula and can inspire other anime pairings that have that game genre. I don’t really like the genre, but I appreciate it anyway. We get a lot of people coming into various other media by trying out these types of games that remind them of Fortnite and other titles. I don’t think it will compete with any of the other big battle royale games, but it doesn’t have to.
My Hero Academia: Ultra Rumble will be released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Bandai Namco has not yet announced when that will be.
0 Comments