The Battle Royale genre is a full and intensely competitive field. With a ton of options, many of which are free to play, players can easily jump from game to game in search of just the right PvP scene. Sci-fi, fantasy, comics and modern military combat are just some of the things that inspired these creative titles.
Inspired by wrestling and featuring a kind of high-flying cartoon action that is almost unheard of in the genre, rumbleverse immediately distinguished itself from its competitors. For every Battle Royale trope the game uses, there’s another one that turns its back on it in search of a different kind of fun. All this has resulted in a unique and often hilarious BR experience. Here are some of the greatest things that rumbleverse does it differently than other battle royale games.
6 Character customization
Battle Royale games are almost synonymous with cool, rare and expensive skins. Customization is at the top of many gamers’ wish lists when it comes to in-game content, making them exactly the person they want to be as they explore new and exciting worlds. In BRs, customization brings an extra layer of satisfaction as the player knows that their chosen face is the last thing the enemy sees before being knocked out.
rumbleverse makes character customization a top priority, allowing players to trade cosmetics in no less than 14 different item slots, allowing them to create exactly the look they want. Even games that have a large number of selectable skins often allow very little customization, making a character look almost exactly the same as any other iteration of that character. In rumbleverse, even if players share one or two cosmetics, they are pretty much guaranteed to be different from each other, creating a unique legacy on the battlefield.
5 Cartoony Aesthetic
Players have radically different tastes when it comes to graphics. Some want the highest level of realism possible, tasking the best and brightest graphics cards with the formidable task of simulating a world that looks and feels like the real one. Others want games that look artistic, cartoonish, minimalist, or even abstract. There is no right answer, just personal taste.
rumbleverse relies heavily on cartoonishness and looks like a show many viewers would have watched as kids early on a Saturday morning. While this may not seem like a significant deviation, as other ORs (the most well-known Fortnite) have taken on a cartoonish aesthetic, it’s one. rumbleverse let its aesthetic permeate every aspect of the game. It doesn’t just look like a cartoon; it feels like one, with crazy antics and fights to match. This isn’t a scaled-down mil-sim with colorful skin; it’s a real cartoon fighting party.
4 Fighting Mechanics
rumbleverse is not a fighting game. It’s important to lead with that caveat, as “fighting game” is a phrase that intimidates many players, conjuring up thoughts of endless combo strings and counter-mechanisms that seem impossible to learn, let alone master. rumbleverse is a battle royale about fighting – albeit cartoon battles between cartoon characters, complete with mid-air dodges and skyscraper elbow drops – without the usual fighting game baggage.
rumbleverse puts an end to the endless array of weapons found in other BRs and replaces them with a simple but satisfying contact system, take inspiration from fighting and wrestling games without feeling too complicated. Strikes feel impactful and, most importantly, fun, and the player doesn’t have to study combos late into the night to progress.
3 Verticality
Map composition in battle royale games is tricky. It’s hard enough to design a card that’s suitable for one player, let alone one that’s large, complex, and balanced to be fun for 100 players. Terrain that both vertically and horizontally is even harder to balance and have fun with, which is one reason many battle royales end up taking place on mostly flat worlds.
Every now and then a battle royale comes along that makes a real swing with verticality.rumbleverse isn’t the first of the genre to swing on a smaller, denser city map where scaling buildings is as achievable as running around at street level, but its unique wrestling aesthetic and melee mechanics make encounters very different in this corner environment than in other ORs.
2 melee
Most BR games start with a frenetic sprint to grab the best guns, bows, grenades and other long-range weapons to take out opponents and finally claim victory. While games like Naraka: Bladepoint have proven that a melee-focused battle royale can work, few titles have embraced melee combat as fully or well as Rumblevers.
Wrestling is more than just an aesthetic in Rumblevers: it is the heart and soul of its combat mechanics. Throws, grabs, flying elbows and other wrestling staples are integral to combat, keeping fights close and personal while avoiding moves that feel too cheap. Other battle royale games feel impersonal at times, with characters being killed halfway through the map by an unseen sniper. The player can still lose in rumbleverse, but at least they have a chance to pack a punch before it happens.
1 Inclusivity
It’s no secret that some games are easier to play than others. While the average battle royale game may be easier to learn and excel at than the average fighting game, that doesn’t mean they all are. Indeed, some BRs have made the difficulty of learning their mechanics part of its appeal, wiping out all but the most hardcore player and cultivating a top-notch but cutthroat competitive scene.
rumbleverse has gone to great lengths to provide players with an alternative, making inclusivity one of its hallmarks. From the character customization process that allows players to better represent themselves in-game to the pick-up and play mechanics to the cartoonish aesthetic of the locations and characters that distances itself from the self-serious aggression and snobbery of some other titles, rumbleverse is a space for everyone. It also happens to be a place for great suplexes.
rumbleverse is now available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Series X/S.
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