Battlepalooza

PALOOZA THIS AIN’T.

Free with IAP

To be a successful Battle Royale experience on mobile, you need to be three things at once – fast, clever, and fair. Speed matters, both in loading and in the pace of the game, as does having a key innovation or mechanic which separates you from the rest. Most importantly, having each player start on the same level and competing on nothing but skill and wits matters. Battlepalooza attempts to meet all three of these elements in one way or another but unfortunately falls short.

The game, straight up, is clunky, slow and poorly localised. While it seems to be one of the (very) few mobile games to have Australian servers, it still feels like it is running inside of a swamp. The frame rate during play is exceedingly low, and the controls don’t feel responsive or tight.

Battlepalooza’s hook is that all of its arenas are based on real-world cities, using data from Google Maps, which is a neat little idea for a developer since they don’t have to build custom arenas. On the flipside, however, this leads to boring, largely grid based roads and buildings that all use the same textures and art – since the game is top down this also limits your line of sight leading to frustrating scenarios where you simply bump into an enemy and start fumbling on your attack buttons.

At the end of the day, it’s a Battle

Royale where you don’t really want to fight, which largely explains its almost deserted player base.