A lot of the joy of a good battle royale comes from the feeling of playing big. If there’s one thing the Rumbleverse is good at, it’s providing opportunities for big plays. Iron Galaxy Studios (developers of Divekick, developers of Seasons 2 and 3 of Killer Instinct)’s latest installment, Rumbleverse, is a free-to-play melee game with a very Fortnite yet engaging cartoonish art style. It’s battle royale, and it’s all infused. The pomp and magnificence of professional wrestling. One moment he slams his opponent into a wall for a brutal wall combo, the next he chokeslams a corpse out of a skyscraper, sometimes taking a giant swing out to sea. It’s silly fun at its best, with some painful moments in the form of slow matchmaking, various lag-related bugs, and a shop that feels a little understocked and expensive compared to what its competitors offer (At least soon, nonetheless, Rumbleverse is one of the most unique battle royales in recent memory, a breath of fresh air in a crowded genre.
The basics of Rumbleverse are familiar: 40 players dive into a huge map, scavenge for loot, and battle it out until you’re one man standing. But Rumbleverse isn’t content with just copying and pasting gameplay, so it tweaks nearly every element of its established formula in interesting ways.
For one, there is no traditional gear or inventory. No need to manage guns, armor, grenades or specific attachments or extensions. Instead, fight with fists, feet, and any road sign you can tear from the ground. (There’s still some loot to collect. Instead of hunting for gear, collect stat-increasing protein powders that boost health, stamina, or damage. Also collect skill manuals that teach you various special moves. .) For this one, Rumbleverse completely avoids the feeling of helplessness that almost all battle royales feel at the start of a match when they’re stuck without a weapon. more fun. No need to run away quickly and try to find the nearest weapon to protect yourself. Some of the most fun I’ve experienced is falling on giant trophy statues and trying to knock everyone off first to get all the high value loot on it. It feels like a small victory in itself.
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Hand-to-hand combat moves are mostly adapted directly from between the ropes of WWE matches – Mist Spit, Chokeslam and Superkick to name just a few – but a few draw inspiration from the world. there is. of video games. There’s Ninja Gaiden’s classic Izuna his drop, a WWF No Mercy-inspired low his blow that can be used as a reversal from the ground, and an aerial flip his kick called “Wreck’t Shot.” Because it is necessary to brush up the JRPG of the PS2 era.
ready to rumble
It certainly tracks that the Rumbleverse developers are partially responsible for Killer Instinct, one of the best fighting games of the last decade. Because it’s very easy to understand the fighting game sensibility at the heart of Rumbleverse combat. Combat revolves around much the same kind of rock-paper-scissors system that most fighting games adhere to. So guards beat strikes, grappling beats guards, and strikes beat grapples. There are of course nuances with the addition of special moves, weapon attacks, power attacks, and special moves, but in general Rumbleverse’s combat system is pretty straight forward at first glance.
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But that’s not all. Mind games are played in almost every interaction. Do you charge in with dangerous drop kicks and expect your opponent to do something other than block? I always keep my brain firing at full speed in encounters, and the feeling of beating my opponent by reading their actions and reacting appropriately is the best.
Aside from the mental aspect of combat, the actual mechanics are also top-notch. You can expend stamina to dodge and cancel certain special move animations, perform some super-smooth combos, or trick enemies into thinking it’s your turn to attack. You can use a charged attack to stun enemies and slam them into walls with the Irish Whip to continue wall combos. You can combo into Super Moves with faster Super Move activations. The list goes on and on. Every time I played, I felt like I learned some kind of new technique that I didn’t know before. Incredible thought has been put into every aspect of combat design.
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Indeed, Rumbleverse could have done a better job of actually teaching us this. You have to queue like a regular match. The information in it is great, but I wish it were offline and the tutorials in it could be found elsewhere.
There’s only one map right now, but it’s appropriately huge, and you can have battles in many different locations, each of which prefers certain types of battles. When fighting along the coast, be especially careful with throwing. One giant swing or Irish whip can quickly send you to a water graveyard. Fighting in a suburban neighborhood gives you the chance to hide in the bushes and recover or lie down for an ambush. Also, when fighting downtown Grapital City, you can always keep your eyes on the sky in fear of explosive flying elbow drops.
extreme rules
Rumbleverse has a few other twists on the typical Battle Royale formula hidden in tights. Motivating everyone to get into scrap and take risks by rewarding them. These perks may not seem like much early on. I honestly didn’t notice it at all in my first few games, but they really do make a difference if you have the means and knowledge to use them. . Another adds an explosion effect to the standard 3-hit combo, allowing it to bounce off walls. Another adds a follow-up Dive Bomb attack to the Dropkick, dealing more damage. They strike a nice balance by being powerful enough to give a person an edge.
Another big difference is that rings that slowly close at regular intervals, shrinking the available play space, don’t actually do any damage. Instead, just like in true professional wrestling, being outside the ring will start a countdown from 10, and being outside when the count reaches 0 will disqualify you. Especially when you get to the last few players, the playing field is so small that you sometimes run out of rings. It also creates very tense moments. However Try to put it back before the 10 count or stop someone else from coming back before it can be DQed.
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Unfortunately, while Rumbleverse is impressive on a mechanical level, on a technical level it struggles in its first two days of launch. Aside from long queue times on startup, occasional server disconnects, and login issues, it takes a very long time to drop into a match, and many of the matches I’ve played are to the point where they’re not fun to play. .
That said, as I continued to play over the launch weekend, there were already steps towards improvement. No more problems. Queues and matchmaking times are still longer than expected, but it’s at least a great sign for Rumbleverse’s continued health that the fixes the developers are implementing are making a noticeable difference.
