Ring Of Elysium
PUBG meets Steep in Tencent’s free-to-play battle royale
The game industry has proved time and again since PUBG’s unlikely ascendance that it is perfectly possible to match it for quality, and even exceed it, without garnering the merest fraction of its audience. Ring Of Elysium, from planet Earth’s biggest game company Tencent, might prove the exception to that rule. Already possessing a player base large enough to crack Steam’s top 20 during Early Access, it evidently has the power to lure some old stalwarts out from the comfort of their Erangel hidey-holes.
The major deviation from battle royale 101 here is in traversal. Rather than leap out of the plane to escape the voice-chat DJs of PUBG or board the Fortnite battle bus, in Ring Of Elysium you choose a location on the map and appear there. If that sounds like it removes a little of the giddy chaos from your typical round, that’s because it does. Very little tends to happen in the opening couple of minutes here, and while that’s on one hand a refreshing change from having one’s skull cracked open by a barefoot fellow with a frying pan, on the other it’s a missed opportunity. Three loadouts are available before you spawn. The Glider pack endows you with a pistol and some ammo in addition to the titular glider, offering great mobility but limited carrying space; the Skiing pack comes with a snowboard and a pistol and ammo, intended as the balanced mobility/capacity build; and the Climbing pack’s pick and shotgun let you scale icy walls and do huge close-range damage. Although there’s an undeniable tradeoff of first-minute chaos for serene snowboarding, Ring Of Elysium does its level best to make that tradeoff worth it by letting you pop stunts on your board while you cruise its wintry map. And although it doesn’t feel as smooth as the snowboarding barometer of our time, Ubisoft’s Steep, it’s satisfying enough to warrant inclusion. Statistically you’re almost certain to die anyway: you might as well be pulling off a backflip in mid-air when it happens. And it makes combat more dynamic. When you’re under fire from an unseen opponent, the last thing they’re expecting is for you to glide away on winter sports equipment.
It’s certainly not the natural progression of the genre, though. Driving a car or a motorbike is usually perilous enough – and rest assured there are motor vehicles throughout the map – so as Ring Of Elysium evolves, it needs to demonstrate that the mountain climbing and winter sports aren’t a gimmick, but an essential tool. At this stage in development, they feel somewhere between the two. Given that you’re able to spawn anywhere and that the game map feels smaller than most battle-royale venues, covering great distances at speed is less of a concern here than in other games in the genre.
As with PUBG’s mobile launch, in which Tencent also had a stake, bots are a noticeable presence here. In your first match they make up 100 per cent of the 59-strong opposition, and as you progress the game lets you know that it’ll introduce smaller and smaller numbers of them until you’re fighting, presumably, on an all-human server. At this stage in development the bots are fearsomely accurate and considerably less fun to play against than human opponents. After all, it’s our tendency to experiment and do things just for the fun of it that makes battle-royale gaming such a joy in its best moments. Baiting buildings for players so that they think they reached a house that hasn’t been looted yet is PUBG’s giddiest thrill – but you can’t bait a bot. There is some promise in Ring Of Elysium’s frankly bizarre blend of winter sports sandbox and killing fields, though, and a sizeable player base banking on that promise coming to fruition.
There’s an undeniable tradeoff of first-minute chaos for serene snowboarding