Battle royale
The circle might be shrinking, but the genre isn’t
When it comes to battle royale games, what more needs to be said? They’re everywhere. Even your nan probably has a favourite. While PUBG:
Battlegrounds was largely responsible for popularising the genre, Fortnite took it mainstream. When it was released, Fortnite:
Battle Royale was a mode hastily developed to stand alongside the crafting survival main game, but now it’s Fortnite’s main thing. Sometimes you’ve just got to dive in.
And that’s exactly what you do in this genre. Large groups of players jump into a huge map and have to pick one another off as a timer ticks down, while the available space in which to do battle shrinks ever smaller.
What sets individual games apart are the twists developers make on that simple formula to stand out. Fortnite doesn’t just have building mechanics enabling you to sprout your own cover, but often plays with limited-time modes that usually play into huge media crossovers (Aquaman’s flooded map, for instance). PUBG is a more straightforward, realistic military shooter, which has been largely usurped by Call Of Duty: Warzone (though the series only achieved success after stumbling with the less than stellar Call Of Duty: Blackout, bundled as part of Black Ops IIII).
Apex Legends, meanwhile, blends excellent FPS mechanics (developer Respawn made Titanfall 2, after all) and hero shooter characters together with well-developed lore to create a great place to shoot.
As the biggest three, Fortnite, Warzone, and Apex Legends have plenty of veteran players ready to shoot you to ribbons, so this is a genre best played with friends, allowing you to find the fun beyond being the last one standing.
ROYAL PARDON
Perhaps of all genres, battle royale is the most competitive, and the one the most failed free-toplay-games fall within. Even some genuinely great ones have shut down over the years (the enjoyable magic-slinging Spellbreak shutters early next year, for example). The best ones offer something genuinely different to what’s popular, giving the over-saturated genre novel twists. While Realm Royale is a gunfest, the fantasy setting gives us something new to grip onto, whereas Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt adds minor stealth elements as you try to avoid being spotted committing vampiric murder by civilians (whose blood you can suck for extra lives). Rumbleverse ditches guns completely in favour of grappling, shooting wrestlers out of a cannon, leaving them to clamber up towers and high-dive off them and learn special moves to slap foes about (read our review on p98).
“Large groups of players jump into a huge map and have to pick one another off.”