Every time I load into a Battle Royale (opens in new tab) I feel a little nervous. There’s the uncertainty of the early game, then later the feeling of being surrounded as the walls get closer – I always end up feeling a little stressed. Not so with Rumbleverse (opens in new tab), the new battle royale brawler on the Epic Games Store. I start every match eager to fight it out with a bunch of wildly dressed knuckleheads. If a match gets off to a good start, I’ll land atop a skyscraper, immediately break open a crate to grab a special move, and knock someone out from 100 floors up.
Now I know: Another battle royale? Listen to me though – Rumbleverse takes the best elements of playing wrestling games with your friends and drops them off the top rope straight into a Fortnite match.
Rumbleverse stays fairly faithful to the battle royale basics. 40 players fly in, the circle is getting smaller, the last man standing, yada yada. But instead of barging in with nothing and scrambling for gear, you can start scrapping right away with a surprisingly technical fighting move set taken straight from professional wrestling. This takes the worst part of your typical Battle Royale – running around for 60 seconds, finding nothing and being disturbed by someone who already has a shotgun – and removing it completely. You get right into the action and everyone is on an equal footing.
However, you will find shiny things to make you stronger. After a giant cannon blasts you at the huge map, you can run around and break crates for a variety of goodies. Powders increase your maximum health and stamina, consumables restore them, weapons such as broken wooden planks and folding chairs are applied directly to the face.
The best things to find are the special moves. From Ryu Hayabusa’s Izuna drop to the hilariously named Rekt Shot (here you see yourself, Tidus), these moves give you upgrades over your usual drop kicks, suplexes, and Irish Whips.
Combat draws from fighting games, but with a rock paper scissors approach: blocks beat attacks, hit beat throws and throws beat blocks. Special moves take priority in a collision with regular ones, and a powerful move like a running dropkick can even outshine some specials. It all adds up to a satisfying stew, unsurprising given Iron Galaxy’s ancestry with Killer Instinct. I found myself having technical chess games with cunning opponents: I’d dodge a combo to lure him into a throw attempt, have him counterattack with a whip to smash me into a wall, only to have a third party knock us both through dropping an atomic bend from the nearby highway overpass.
This is still wrestling, even if it feels like a one-on-one fighting game.
It’s chaotic fun and every system in the game leads you into action. Players who show up and avoid combat can collect the maximum 10 powders and two special moves, but they gain no combat experience. Each point of damage you give or receive is added to an XP bar which results in some pretty excellent perks: more attack damage from explosions, lower stamina costs, a meditation mode that lets you heal by standing still. In the last circle (which often has as many as 10 players), you’re at a serious disadvantage if you don’t have any of those buffs.
The ever-present Battle Royale circle is also a bit different. It covers a smaller part of the map than you might think, and if you’re outside of it, it does no damage. Instead, in true wrestling style, the announcer will start giving you a count of ten, then knocking you out if you’re still off the track. This leads to some super fun cat-and-mouse moments that lure people out of the ring and eliminates the pesky bleed damage that has made so many Battle Royales standard.
For those who really like customization, there’s an in-game store with the kind of microtransactions you’d expect: luchador masks, wrestling shirts, giant chicken heads. They are on the expensive side and the store is fairly spartan so far, but I expect this to improve over time.
My biggest problem with Rumbleverse is the lack of a decent tutorial. You have to wait in a queue to load into the training map with other players, which is annoying, and the information is scattered all over the map. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of it though, and once I started driving people, I didn’t want to stop.
0 Comments